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  Guest Workers Revisited: Moroccan Immigrants, Spanish Strawberries and Europe's Future

Guest Workers Revisited Moroccan Immigrants, Spanish Strawberries and Europe's Future

By Daniela Gerson in Cartaya, Spain

Part 2: "We Have to Think About Other Countries"

Gonzalez prefers it this way. While Eastern Europeans are more popular among the locals, González believes the North African workers have a cultural advantage. “Any business owner wants people who will get up early, work all day, that don’t smoke, don’t drink don’t go to the discotheque,” he says.

And, he might have added, managers like workers who are content with their lot. Prior to the new program -- with many staying in Spain illegally -- that was not always the case. Five years ago, at 17, Zohra Oualiddouche left her village in the Atlas Mountains, where she said the €3 a day she made in the fields was hardly enough to feed her family. When she was offered the chance to pay thousands for an unlimited Spanish visa and a job on González's farm, she jumped at it. Soon, though, she realized she had been conned, but stayed on illegally anyway and ended up cleaning houses for €300 a month in Portugal.

Now, Oualiddouche's life seems like the immigrant dream. González sponsored her for legal status; she can visit her family in the off-season; and her fiancée, a Moroccan man she met in the strawberry fields, recently bought a used Mercedes that they use to drive to Spanish classes.

"My husband is going crazy"

But one day after work, over a communal meal with a half-dozen men from her town, she said life is not really better for her in Spain than in Morocco. The program with the mothers, she believes, is a better arrangement. If she’d had housing and travel covered as they do, she never would have stayed. “This is better because they come for free, without money without anything,” she says.

Some of the mothers, however, complained their arrangement was far from ethical. In the pinewoods between the town and the beach, more than 1,000 workers live in a former fire fighting camp, known as “House of the Cat.” Saida Zwin, a middle-aged mother of four, is on her third season picking strawberries, but is not satisfied with her temporary status. Speaking in Arabic through a translator, she says, “My husband is going crazy, left all alone.”

González empathizes, to a point. Separation is difficult, but he says the women make 10 times what they would have earned in Morocco. Indeed, he is convinced he is playing a part in making migrants lives better, and advocates the expansion of the program as a way to stop illegal immigration. With workers in the new EU countries choosing other places with higher wages, he believes it is crucial to continue developing such relationships. “We have to think about Senegal," he says. “We have to think about other countries in Africa, or the Ukraine.”

Daniela Gerson is a German Chancellor Scholar from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

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