What do Spaniard think about labour migration policies and immigrants integration? Attitudes and policy preferences in times of crisis

After being considered an attractive immigration country at the beginning of twenty-first century, Spain rapidly became the country with one of the highest unemployment rates in the European Union. The current economic crisis brought the Government to a restrictive policy shift, considerably restricting access to Spanish territory to labour immigrants and seriously affecting integration policies. In this framework of an overall more selective immigration policy-making , opinions and attitudes towards immigration do not seem to have deeply changed and worsened, unlike what is usually expected in times of economic crisis. Through descriptive and multivariate analysis of the comparative dataset 2009-2013 Transatlantic Trends on Immigration (TTI) and Transatlantic Trends (TT), this paper aims to understand which type of immigration policy approach is preferred by Spanish citizens (compared to German, English, Italian and French citizens), how polarized are such preferences, which role is played by individual characteristics in shaping them and how the immigrants’ integration has been perceived during the economic downturn. The results suggest that there is a gap between migration policy-making and policy preferences or perceptions on immigration expressed by Spanish citizens.