Factors and reasons of immigratory afluence to the BAC. What «effects called» do we talk about?

Abstract

The scope of this article is the factors and reasons that explain the immigration to the Basque Country, in order to verify if it is the social aid one of them.To aim this, a combined empirical quantitative and qualitative research has been proposed, allowing to cross data contributed by the official statistics with expert knowledge. Thus, the quantitative part would provide information on the presence of foreigners in the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC) and its comparison with the rest of Spain; and the qualitative part would contribute to all the existing expert knowledge in the matter of international migratory flows.The results obtained show an increase of immigrant presence in the BAC for the last two decades, but this is far from being a community claim for the potential immigrant, because the position below the national average in absolute and percentage terms; and with the results of the interviews carried out, make it possible to overturn the usual discourse in which the income Welfare Benefits (WB) —and another series of social aids— encourages the arrival of immigration to the community, giving way to another series of factors or reasons of arrival such as job opportunities and social networks already settled in destination. Somehow, society is in the dilemma between a reality presented by the mass media or the political class where immigration is almost always linked to social assistance at destination, and the reality of an immigration that attends the employment opportunities offered.