Inmigración extranjera en el País Vasco. Estrategias políticas para la gestión de la diversidad

Abstract

The Autonomous Community of the Basque Country has experienced an important growth of inflows and settlements of foreign population in the last years. This affirmation, applicable to any of the Spanish autonomies, acquires certain singularity in case of the Basque Country. The minor inflows of foreign immigration that the indexes of other autonomous communities, the composition for nationalities and the institutional and social response to a phenomenon that, in spite of being important, does not reach the levels of other autonomous communities, are the features that they characterize to the Autonomous Basque Community as for foreign immigration. Nevertheless there exist indications that force to interrogate by the new role that might play the Basque Country as host society of an immigration that can perceive other Spanish communities as saturated. The attitudes of the Basque society and the wide set of integration policies might collaborate to directing good part of the wide internal mobility of the foreigners to Basque lands. The article will expose the demographic situation of the foreign population in the Basque Country, as well as the political and social response of the Basque society, and it will finish with a question on the immediate future of these answers, dice the changes that are taking place in the immigration and that soon might take place according to the analyzed indicators.