Foreign families with high purchasing power abandon their children in Spain to obtain residency and free education.
Foreign families with high purchasing power abandon their children in Spain to obtain residency and free education.
A new and concerning trend has been detected in several Spanish provinces, including Granada, Málaga, Madrid, and Tarragona. Families with high economic status (entering Spain on tourist visas) are deliberately abandoning their 17-year-old children at police stations or courts.
The goal is to trigger the protection protocol for unaccompanied migrant minors (MENA), forcing the regional government to assume guardianship, education, and healthcare costs.
Unlike those arriving by boat, these teenagers wear designer clothes, carry high-quality luggage, and often speak multiple languages (English, French, Arabic). Their families can afford plane tickets, visas, and hotel reservations.
The objective is to provide their children with a European education at the taxpayer’s expense and facilitate a path toward Spanish citizenship, which could later benefit the parents through family reunification.
Just in the Province of Granada, more than 35 cases have been recorded this year, overwhelming public resources intended for truly vulnerable minors.
In some cases these parents remain in Granada in case the children need anything. If the National Police manage to locate them, they hand over their children and warn them that they must take responsibility for them.
Simultaneously, the courts are notified of a suspected case of child abandonment. Of all the cases registered this year in the province, the families have been located on several occasions while they were still in the area, but most of the time they had already left.
So, what can be done about it? Whilst Spanish law obliges the State to protect any minor without legal guardians, the Policía Nacional are investigating these cases as criminal child abandonment.
Consequently, in October, a major operation in Tarragona resulted in 30 arrests. The investigation quantified the fraud amounted to €1,589,747 in Social Security contributions, alone.
Officers identified two types of families: on the one hand, they found parents with medium-to-high purchasing power who abandoned the children in Spain and returned to their countries, although they made visits to the centres where the children were placed. The other type had fewer economic resources who remained in Spain and maintained telephone contact with their children, but without taking responsibility for them.
(News: Granada, Andalucia)
Keywords: Child Abandonment, Foreign Minors, Social Security Fraud, Tarragona, Middle to High-Income Families
news, andalucia, granada, child abandonment, foreign minors, social security fraud, tarragona, middle to high-income families