SPAIN'S IMMIGRATION PROBLEM

Spain joins other European countries as it faces the challenge of immigration.

But in another sense, Spain's immigration problem is more severe than any other in Europe. Its population seems to have lost the appetite for procreation altogether. The average woman has 1.32 children, a figure that would have looked like a misprint to any social scientist before the 1980s. As a result, Spain's native-born population will begin contracting with shocking rapidity after 2014, and it is too late to do anything to stop it. Already Spain has gaping holes in its labor supply. The strawberry fields and clementine groves of Andalusia require tens of thousands of pickers every year. The tomato-growing greenhouses near Almería rely on Moroccan labor, and Eastern Europeans staff many tourist hotels. During the recent regional elections in Catalonia, when candidate Artur Mas urged that newcomers be held accountable to measurable assimilation criteria, the left-wing daily El País ran a picture of the Spanish factory that made Mas's campaign posters. It was manned by Pakistanis, of whom Barcelona has about 30,000. (In November, Pakistan announced it was opening a consulate there.) Naturally, sub-Saharan Africans would like their own piece of this economy.