Expats in Spain

Becoming Spanish

A while back, I received a private message from a young Turk who followed my blog. He was asking about professional opportunities in Spain for those who didn’t want to do manual labor such as running a kebab restaurant or a hairdresser. His comments helped me accept that I was rather dramatizing about immigrant stories and elaborating on the cases of the most unfortunate ones who were making it from the bottom. He wanted to know what Spain had to offer to people like him, university graduates who were fluent in multiple languages and who considered themselves as global citizens.

In this post, I will dedicate a few words to address this situation, using personas based on a large number of expats I know who are based in Spain, especially in Barcelona. Before anything else, however, I must add that this post is for non-EU citizens because unless you’re a British citizen with a complicated Brexit situation, you have it easy in Spain with an EU passport. Apart from learning Spanish (only if you want), familiarizing yourself with the culture, and getting a NIE, you don’t need to do much more. In other words, for EU citizens who move to major cities in Spain, the situation is akin to those of provincial Spaniards moving elsewhere within their country for work.