The Position and Status of Migrant Women in Spain

Resumen

Almost all existing literature on immigrants and migration flows from developing countries to Spain has been written during the 1990s. The second half of the 1990s has been specially fruitful in producing contributions to the issue of gender and migration. This chapter describes policy and administrative measures adopted by the Spanish government to control non-EU immigration since 1986. Southern Europe can be recognized as an area that receives migrants after several decades of being a source of emigration to central and northern Europe, in fact, from the 1950s to the mid-1970s there was a negative migration balance in Spain, which became positive in the late 1970s. The economic and political integration of Spain into the European Community in 1986 played a major role in the process of regulation of foreign migration. Most female migration to southern Europe was started by women and followed by other women of the family or neighbourhood.