The Spanish government’s ongoing mass amnesty for illegal migrants has already caused a functional collapse of social services across Madrid, a report states.
The administration of socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is presently on the first weeks of its highly-controversial plan to grant as many as half a million illegal migrants with legal residence status and work permits, provided they comply with a list of — extremely lax and questionably enforced — requirements. The amnesty plan officially went into action in mid-April and will run through the end of June.
Unnamed Madrid municipal sources told Spanish publication Okdiario that the sheer workload imposed by the mass amnesty plan has collapsed local government offices across all of the autonomous Community of Madrid and has led to significant delays in the local governments’ ability to assist Spanish families in need.
David Conde, the mayor of the southern Madrid town of Valdemoro, spoke with Okdiario and criticized the Spanish government for having executed the mass amnesty plans without “sufficient planning or any coordination with local authorities,” a situation that has caused appointment delays at the Valdemoro City Hall of as many as 15 days for local residents and families in need seeking government assistance despite the best efforts of the municipality’s social services personnel to avert such an outcome.
“Social Services professionals at the Valdemoro City Council cannot issue public documents without the administrative rigor that this requires. However, it seems that the government views migrants as objects to be distributed, but they are people, and we simply cannot keep up with the demand to assist them properly,” Conde told Okdiario. “These circumstances are severely disrupting the regular work of municipal employees, as well as services for the rest of the town’s population.”
On Monday, Conde used his social media accounts to publish a copy of a letter he sent to Francisco Martin Aguirre, the Spanish government’s official delegate in the Community of Madrid, in which he denounced the “devastating” impact that the mass amnesty processing has had to his municipality’s operational capacities — stressing that his office is facing a “progressive collapse” of all municipal services involved in the amnesty. He warned that the town hall does not have the human resources to diligently attend local residents and migrant amnesty submissions at the same time, leading to deficiencies in basic services “that have nothing to do with the ordinary municipal management.”
Okdiario reported that a similar situation is being experienced in the town of Pinto, led by Mayor Salomón Aguado, where illegal migrants have “collapsed” the town hall’s citizen services division.
Insiders said migrants are presenting themselves to the town hall seeking to get a stamp on their certificate of vulnerable status with the form already pre-filled, something that “cannot be done, because for a staff member to sign a certificate, they have to have conducted an interview and a follow-up first.”
Like Mayor Conde, Pinto also reportedly issued a letter to the Spanish government representative in Madrid criticizing that the amnesty decree “was processed in a completely unilateral manner, without the involvement of the local governments that are now bearing the bureaucratic burden of it.”
The oversaturation and collapse of public services caused by the mass amnesty process has not been limited to local town hall offices. Last week, Spanish outlets reported that offices of Spain’s national postal service Correos have collapsed due to the overwhelming amount of migrants seeking to submit their mass amnesty requests. The Spanish government is using a significant amount of Correos locations across Spain as reception centres for amnesty applications.
Most alarmingly, local outlets reported this week that Correos issued an operational manual to its personnel with instructions as to how to process the amnesty applications. Initial versions of the manual reportedly omitted to detail that migrants must attach a certificate of possessing no criminal records to their applications — a “mistake” that could have led to hundreds of applications being erroneously filed.
