‘Origin matters'

Almería is famous for its intensive horticulture. ¹ The Andalusian province, located in the dry Mediterranean south-east of Spain, was a poor region characterized by enormous emigration until the 1970s. Since the late 1980s, the expansion of agriculture and tourism enabled a dramatic shift from emigration to immigration. Agricultural development has been crucial for several reasons. First, the province has specialized in intensive horticulture under plastic greenhouses, today covering close to 29,000ha in the area (MAAMA, 2012, p. 60), and has succeeded in developing a complex auxiliary industry in its vicinity, which is one of its major competitive advantages. Second, due to a still small-scale farm structure with about 14,000 farmers, agricultural production is embedded in the local society. While farming was originally organized within family structures, since the 1990s it has become increasingly common to hire workers, many of them foreigners, in order to cope with production increases and the drop out of family members from agricultural tasks (see Martínez Veiga, this volume). These workers have inherited the precarious working conditions of intensive agriculture but not equal participation in the benefits. The Almerían success story (see Aznar-Sánchez et al., this volume) is simultaneously a story of social fragmentation and rupture. Besides environmental pollution and the degradation of natural resources, the social integration of migrants is one of its most important challenges. This chapter investigates the working and living conditions of the two main groups of immigrants, Romanians and Moroccans, working in the agricultural sector of Almería. For both, agriculture has been of crucial importance for their labour market insertion, but the two groups are highly different in terms of skills, legal status and time living in Spain. Despite the fact that they have been subject to the same structural constraints, they have followed different social trajectories. We will analyse labour performances, compare the agricultural working conditions for migrant workers with other sectors and, last, explore the different impacts that the recent recession is having on both groups.