Introduction

As mentioned in the Introduction to this volume and particularly in chapter 5, the two Iberian nations, Portugal and Spain, have experienced a transition from emigration to immigration countries since the 1980s. This process has occurred during a specific moment of the political and economic evolution of both countries, marked, on the one hand, by the consolidation of their democratic regimes and their integration with the European Union and, on the other hand, by significant economic growth. This growth cannot be dissociated from the dynamics of the construction and public works sectors, nor from the expansion of family consumption and investment, which (especially at the beginning of this period) benefited greatly from European funding. The status of ‘immigration countries’ was symbolically and de facto reached at the very beginning of the first decade of the twenty-first century, when the number of foreigners settled in both countries grew exponentially.

The policy process framing this relatively rapid transition of the Iberian states to immigrant receiving countries has been considered casuistic and fragmented (Baganha & Marques 2001; Costa 2003) and has often been labelled as permissive and weakly regulated. As mentioned by Joaquín Arango (2005) and António Vitorino (2007: 23), for some Northern European politicians and public officials, their transition has even represented a danger for the whole EU due to the ‘promotion’ of irregular migration supposedly associated with the successive immigrant regularisations that took place in the second half of the 1980s. However, authors such as Martin Baldwin-Edwards (1999) remarked that the reactive and fragmented Southern European (and therefore Iberian) immigration policies were in line with the dominant local regulation scheme and its associated economic model, marked by an extensive informal economy and low wages in many sectors (Reyneri 1999; Baganha 1998).

Taking into consideration this last assumption, this chapter will try to demonstrate how Portugal and Spain have developed a low regulation immigration model that has contributed to supporting the relatively high levels of economic growth in both countries (1991-2001 in Portugal; 1995-2007 in Spain) and that was well adjusted to the specific features of the Iberian ‘proxy’ of neo-liberalism implemented in a society characterised by practices marked by familiarism, informality and traditionalism.