National
Immigrant numbers to be limited across Catalan schools
By h.b.
Apr 28, 2008 - 5:59 PM

New draft laws in the Cataluña region will limit the number of immigrants in public and other colleges as part of a regional education law. The law will allow a different percentage of foreigners in each education area, and those areas which have few foreigners will be able to increase the number of places by 10% to accept them in. It means however that the regional Generalitat is to fix an upper limit on the number of foreigners in each area, with the idea of avoiding ghettos.
The new education law proposals in Cataluña no longer have the idea of opening up the school to private initiatives – a subject which saw strike action by teaches in protest last February 14.

Meanwhile a new ‘contract of integration’ is to be set up for immigrants in the Valencia region. The idea was part of the national Partido Popular manifesto from Mariano Rajoy at the last election, and is being pushed forward in the PP controlled Valencia region by their Immigration and Citizenship Councillor, Rafael Blasco.
Under the plan, which would be part of a future regional immigrant integration law, the immigrants would have to sign a ‘contract for integration’. Blaso says under the contract they would ‘assume our model of coexistence, and our values’. He described Valencia as a land of opportunities open to all, provided they integrated in the local values, customs and traditions so the ‘social cohesion of the region’ was not lost.

All these changes come as the central Socialist government is looking at the idea of giving non-EU immigrants who have been residing and working in Spain for some time the right to vote in municipal elections here. EU citizens already have that right.