Immigrants with disabilities in Spain

Abstract

The great worldwide increase in migration in the last half-century has given rise to many studies seeking to explain its causes, the various factors influencing its development or its effects on the host societies. But, to date, few studies have focused on migratory flows of people with disabilities, and there is little reliable data on the relationship between immigration and disability. In Spain, the Survey on Disability, Personal Autonomy and Dependency Situations (EDAD-2008) allows us to address in part the socioeconomic situation of immigrants with disabilities. Specifically, this paper seeks to analyze some of this group’s basic social and demographic features, such as regional distribution by country of origin, level of education or degree of integration into working life, a key aspect in overcoming the twin risk of social exclusion faced by immigrants with disabilities. Key words: Immigration, people with disabilities, labour integration. INTRODUCTION Both the specialist literature on the study of migratory processes and that focusing on people with disabilities, have omitted to analyze the situation and difficulties experienced by immigrants with disabilities (Sandys, 1998). For developed countries, there are studies analyzing the differences between the population with disabilities by race or country of birth (Zola, Pfeiffer and Makas, 1996; Kingdom and Smith, 1997; Fujiura, Yamak and Czechowicz, 1998; Stienstra, 2002; Singh and Hiatt, 2006), or from a multicultural perspective (Groce, 1990; Groce and Zola, 1993; Groce, 1999), or focusing on the elderly (Coward et al., 1997; Berkman and Gurland, 1998; Miller, 2000). But these studies centre rather on an analysis of immigration and disability as factors in belonging to minorities at risk of social exclusion. A fundamental problem in addressing this issue is the scarcity of quantitative information. Data on people with disabilities are limited for several reasons. First, the operational definitions of disability vary from a country or survey to another, and thus are not comparable. Second, information about disabilities frequently is included in surveys only partially and it is obtained from self-reported