The Spanish government’s ongoing mass amnesty for illegal migrants has already caused a functional collapse of social services across Madrid, a report states.
The administration of socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is presently on the first weeks of its highly-controversial plan to grant as many as half a million illegal migrants with legal residence status and work permits, provided they comply with a list of — extremely lax and questionably enforced — requirements. The amnesty plan officially went into action in mid-April and will run through the end of June.
Unnamed Madrid municipal sources told Spanish publication Okdiario that the sheer workload imposed by the mass amnesty plan has collapsed local government offices across all of the autonomous Community of Madrid and has led to significant delays in the local governments’ ability to assist Spanish families in need.
David Conde, the mayor of the southern Madrid town of Valdemoro, spoke with Okdiario and criticized the Spanish government for having executed the mass amnesty plans without “sufficient planning or any coordination with local authorities,” a situation that has caused appointment delays at the Valdemoro City Hall of as many as 15 days for local residents and families in need seeking government assistance despite the best efforts of the municipality’s social services personnel to avert such an outcome.
“Social Services professionals at the Valdemoro City Council cannot issue public documents without the administrative rigor that this requires. However, it seems that the government views migrants as objects to be distributed, but they are people, and we simply cannot keep up with the demand to assist them properly,” Conde told Okdiario. “These circumstances are severely disrupting the regular work of municipal employees, as well as services for the rest of the town’s population.”
