A Spanish TIPS

last updated 8 January 2015

Madrid

Spain is asking citizens to watch for and report illegal immigrants to the government. The Interior Ministry said this week that it would create “a network of alerts and social denunciations” through which neighborhood-watch committees could tattle on suspected illegal immigrants in their communities. Spain, with a population of 40 million, is home to at least half a million—and possibly as many as 1 million—illegal aliens, mostly from nearby Morocco. But opposition leaders said that urging citizens to spy on their neighbors was not the way to handle the problem. Consuelo Rumi of the opposition Socialist Party said the program sounded eerily like the denunciations that everyone feared during the fascist era. “We don’t like such practices,” she said, “for political dissidents or for immigrants.”