Finding People Homes in Places that Need People
Clinical Professor Susan Akram is working to match refugees and asylum seekers with depopulated towns in Spain.
Yanguas, Spain, once home to 1,200 people, now has a population of between 68 and 113, depending on the season. | Photo courtesy of Susan Akram
Finding People Homes in Places that Need People
Clinical Professor Susan Akram is working to match refugees and asylum seekers with depopulated towns in Spain.
In Yanguas, a small town in northern Spain that has between 68 and 113 people depending on the season, the local school was on the verge of shutting down—funding requirements mandate that there be at least four children enrolled; Yanguas had just one child, period—until the mayor convinced a migrant family from Morocco to join the community.
That is the kind of matchmaking Boston University School of Law Clinical Professor Susan M. Akram hopes to do more of as part of a developing effort she is helping lead. The project would place refugees and asylum seekers in municipalities that are struggling to survive in the face of massive population loss, as young people move to larger cities in search of economic opportunities.
Akram, who directs BU Law’s International Human Rights Clinic and has worked for decades to address obstacles faced by refugees and forced migrants, spent last year exploring the project on a Fulbright Senior Scholarship. She worked with Spanish university partners to research relevant laws, and traveled around Spain to meet with people like the Yanguas mayor who told her about the needs of communities that have given rise to the term “La España vaciada”—emptied Spain. This fall, her partners on the project, known as Refugees Revitalizing Emptied Spain (RRES), met with members of the Spanish government to discuss the proposal, which is a form of community-sponsored resettlement.
According to official data, 90 percent of the Spanish population is concentrated in 1,500 towns that take up just 30 percent of the country’s land. In the rest of the country, there are just 14 people per square kilometer. Meanwhile, Spain leads the European Union in the number of people seeking asylum, with more than 100,000 applications pending. Akram’s proposal, which she began to develop in the spring of 2020 with Dorothy Estrada-Tanck, an international law professor and director of the human rights clinic at the Universidad de Murcia in Spain, would match people in need of protection with towns in need of people. The third principal partner on the project is Fundación Cepaim, a Spanish NGO with years of experience working with migrants and asylum seekers.
“This is a win-win,” Akram says of the idea. “Our proposal is to draft a Spanish law that would include community sponsorship as a major pathway to making refugee resettlement happen.”
Akram says she first came up with the idea for an effort like RRES about a decade ago while watching a documentary about abandoned Spanish towns.
“Seeing the pictures of these beautiful, old stone houses that were falling apart in these idyllic villages reminded me so much of the stone houses I’d seen in Syria and Lebanon,” says Akram. “I thought, ‘Syrian refugees know how to build these homes.’”
The possibility continued to percolate in Akram’s mind, but she wasn’t able to act on it until she met with Estrada-Tanck, who had been thinking along the same lines. Estrada-Tanck, in turn, had worked closely with Cepaim, which had for several years been helping relocate migrants with temporary status who are in Spain to depopulated communities through a project it calls Nuevos Senderos, or new paths. One major difference in the RRES proposal is that it would resettle refugees from abroad and asylum recipients who have permanent status and therefore are able to truly establish themselves in the towns that need them.
This would be a game changer for Spain, and potentially a model that can be duplicated elsewhere in Europe.
Significant funding for RRES is available. The European Union guarantees 10,000 Euros per resettled refugee and also offers a separate funding stream specifically for depopulated areas.
“That’s a big carrot for the communities,” Akram says. “That kind of funding can help with developing housing and other needs that the community will benefit from over the long term.”
Other countries—including Canada, Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the Netherlands—have various forms of community-sponsored resettlement, but Akram says Spain is an ideal place to pilot a project like RRES because of its massive unmet resettlement needs. RRES would also help the country meet its obligations under EU and international law; currently, Spain rejects 95 percent of international protection claims, far higher than the EU average. Between 2015 and 2018, Spain resettled 1,433 people and relocated another 1,359 despite committing to resettle more than 17,000.
If the Spanish government green lights the RRES proposal, Akram envisions that she and her partners could begin piloting the project next summer. Meanwhile, students in her clinic at BU Law would work together with Estrada-Tanck’s students to draft a Spanish law that would formally implement the proposal.
“Everyone is so excited about this project,” Akram says. “This would be a game changer for Spain, and potentially a model that can be duplicated elsewhere in Europe.”
