In the midst of all of the hateful voices that have emerged recently it’s easy to forget that we aren’t the only country in the world with an “immigration problem”. At least it seems ours is the only country that seems to have politicians, pundits and other clowns getting riled up about things like a translation of the national anthem.

While other countries’ elected officials may have a bit more tact when it comes to speaking out about immigration, the battle in the arena of public thought — to reject or embrace immigrants — rages on in other “developed” nations. One needs to look no further than the incidents in France last year to see that the immigrant cause is not one unique to the USA.

What inspired this post is that I read the Spanish press daily and at least once a week there is a story with a headline that goes something like this: “157 immigrants arrive on the coast of the Canary Islands in rafts”. Normally the story shares an account of how many people left Africa on said rafts, how many people actually made it to Spanish soil (the Canary Islands, while Spanish territory, is actually only about 150 miles off the Sahara) alive, how the immigrants were treated for dehydration and how babies were taken by the Red Cross for care.

The frequency by which these stories appear in the newspaper leads me to believe that Spain has an immigration issue. We may not hear about it too much, but believe me, it’s something that is seething below the surface throughout Europe. A country about the size of one of the larger U.S. states, with a huge unemployment rate, rising costs of living, and a history of low levels of immigration, Spain has been slowly going into shock over the influx of immigrants from Africa and (to a lesser extent) Latin America.

To draw another comparison to the U.S. immigration situation, Spain shares a border with Morocco:

Indeed, the situation in Europe is a virtual carbon copy of America’s southern border with Mexico. American reporter Eric Schlosser even goes so far as to call Spain the “California of Europe.” Like much of southern California, the Almeria region of southern Spain specializes in vast produce farms heavy on irrigation and heavily reliant on low-wage labor.

Sound familiar? There are also those who want to build a bigger wall.

So what do people there think about the immigration situation? I like to think that most people in Spain are like the people I know: tolerant and color blind. But in reading some of the reader comments on an article about more arrivals to the Canary Coast, I hear echos of what those who oppose immigrants here go on and on about. Almost all the comments on the article I read today are negative, like this one:

Great, more piranhas in the aquarium. Surely they’ll take our jobs since they are cheap labor. Why did Spain have to be next to Africa?!

The U.S. is not the only country struggling with this issue right now, nor is it the only place where immigrants are treated like criminals and where race plays a role in who is considered a desirable immigrant and who isn’t. France is debating that very issue today.

The phenomena of the haves and the have nots is not exclusive to the U.S. The U.S. has a lot and Latin America has a lot less. Europe has a lot and Africa has nothing. Just as hundreds die crossing the desert to reach the Rio Grande and make their way to a new life, hundreds more die on the seas to reach the shores of Western Europe, sharing the same sad story thousands of miles away. Their plight is the same, and the rejection they face in their new homelands — if they are lucky enough to reach them alive — is just as harsh, if not harsher.

Related reading: Border Trouble: Europe’s New Wall (Spiegel.de)

Photos via Spiegel.de and Pliegosdelaopinion.net