Undocumented immigrants gather every morning in the Spanish city of Palma (Balearic Islands, Mediterranean) waiting for an employer to give them work in precarious conditions. "We live day by day, getting up early to see who calls us," one of them explains to EFE. This phenomenon, which is repeated in other urban areas of Spain, reflects a stark reality: the difficulties in accessing the labor market faced by foreigners in an irregular situation, who are forced into the informal economy due to the impossibility of regularizing their status. Some of them, emigrated from Latin American or North African countries, recount that they often receive very low wages for long working days, far less than they would earn if they could access a formal work contract. "For an unskilled worker, a fair wage would be 10 euros an hour, but they are paid less," says one of the people who regularly visits areas where undocumented construction workers wait for hours to be hired. Like the foremen of the 19th century, contractors stop by and ask, "What can you do?", taking "two or three" according to their needs. The head of Public Policies for the Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) union in the Balearic Islands, Daniel Cámara, highlights in statements to EFE that these situations hark back to past times when "the foreman would pass by in a truck and say in the square: 'You, get in'." They pick up workers "as happened in the 19th century," the union leader points out, considering it "intolerable" that this continues to happen in the 21st century. He also explains that the exploited undocumented immigrants "must understand that alone they will not be able to do anything," and urges them to go to government bodies, entities, and even trade union organizations, which "can help them to regularize their situation" or, at least, guide them. "There is one thing that works very well in power relations, also in labor relations, and that is fear, and the business sector that does this kind of thing uses it," Cámara adds. This opinion is shared by the cultural mediator Ana Mascaró, who works in Palma, who believes that "the great problem for people on the move is the Foreigners' Law," which conditions migrants and those who work to help them. "We have a Foreigners' Law where migrating is not a right, it is a crime," Mascaró denounces, emphasizing that an undocumented person "cannot do anything with their life, because they cannot work or study" officially, a situation that also has "many consequences for mental health." "Sometimes they pay us fairly, sometimes less," another adds. To their inability to regularize themselves are added displays of racism, with some situations of "humiliation": "Go back to your country; why don't you leave, get out," they say they have been told on occasion. The precariousness of informal work has another consequence: the high cost of housing in the Balearic Islands, with a great tourist demand, which forces them into the irregular rental of substandard housing and rooms. One of the workers states that he pays a rent for sleeping on the sofa in the dining room of the house he shares. "We came to seek a better quality of life, because everyone deserves an opportunity," affirms one of these workers while waiting with the rest of his colleagues, all men, for "entrepreneurs looking for labor" to arrive, without the certainty of finally getting a day's wage.
