The first part of this article focuses on the province of Almería and the social inclusion of Moroccan
immigrants working in greenhouse agriculture; it reveals the significance of social actors (e.g. trade
unions, immigrant organisations, local administration, NGOs, political parties and employers´ associations)
in providing immigrants with access to social benefits. In contrast to a great variety of other studies
concentrating on this issue, research has been conducted on social inclusion as an outcome of a local
bargaining process, constituted by collective actors and their strategies to include or exclude migrants
from different spheres and benefits of the receiving society. Against the background of the local sociopolitical
and economic context, the implications of failing national immigration policies as well as the
deadlocks of an insufficiently funded multi-level framework for the social integration of immigrants become
evident.
The second and concluding part of this article puts the local empirical record of evidences into the
European context: Almería is for many African (but increasingly also Eastern European, Latin American
and Asian immigrants) the space of first physical contact with ”‘Schengen-Europe,” the place of first labour
market insertion and clandestine existence on European soil. Almería hereby can be portrayed as ”Europe
or Spain in small”, a socio-political laboratory on a small spatial scale, bringing together as one (but not
the only) mirror the contemporarily existing Spanish and European realities in the fields of immigrants’
acceptance and integration. In the bigger European picture alike the chosen small-scale context, the
project of an “inclusive society,” so far, remains an unfulfilled dream. In addition to (mostly excessive and
inefficient) control measures, much more financial, political and public support for migrants and
organisations working in the field of inclusion is needed, especially in border regions as spaces of first
social contacts among native and immigrant populations.