The latter concludes the deadline for immigrants in an irregular situation who live or work in any of the 83 Valencian municipalities devastated by the Dana can take advantage. The Government will grant residence and work permits with a duration of one year to those affected and their most direct relatives, which can extend up to five years in the case of foreign relatives of fatalities.
When he launched the extent, the executive estimated at about 25,000 people who could benefit from it. In April, the Minister of Migrations, Elma Saiz, said that about 23,000 immigrants had already requested to accept the process, and that 95% had a favorable resolution. But hundreds of people continue to face, a few days after the end of the term, to a bureaucratic maze to try to demonstrate that they were also victims of the tragedy. When regularization was approved, several associations linked to immigration alerted the limbo in which those who lack a certificate of registration could remain. The Valencia Foreigner Office has opened to accept documents issued by the municipalities, the so -called effective residence reports. However, while some consistories have opted for greater flexibility, others, inexplicably, they are completely disregarding or even denying such a certificate, as different NGOs have criticized.
The Dana showed, in front of the Xenophobic discourse, that thousands of citizens born abroad have the same problems and concerns as their neighbors born in Spain. But also that living in an irregular situation or working in the submerged economy entails a series of obstacles – difficult access to housing, racism, lack of employment or bank account – to which the bureaucracy cannot become an added wall.
With all the caution that are necessary, the Government must be more flexible to facilitate everything the regularization of those people who are now trapped in the impossibility of administratively demonstrating their own existence and their vital situation. First, expanding the deadline for submitting documents, which has been clearly insufficient. And, second, accepting other valid media in law evidence (such as medical or school certificates, interposed complaints, the declaration of witnesses and even personal photos and videos) that prove that situation.
The opposite will lead to these citizens to continue imprisoning an abnormality that violates their dignity as people and their rights, just what the Government is supposed to resolve with extraordinary regularization. And not vice versa. If so, in normal conditions, much more after a catastrophe that has caused more than 220 dead.
