Banks in Spain are receiving millions of euros of taxpayers' money, while hundreds of home owners are being evicted. Unable to continue paying their mortgages because of unemployment or insecure employment, people are chaining themselves to their houses or other symbolic buildings; embarking on indefinite hunger strikes; and suing banks for contract abuse. In effect they are responding to the crisis by claiming and affirming their right to decent housing. Using media, legal-judicial and activist discourses, this commentary investigates the innovative political and legal tactics of the Spanish anti-eviction protests regarding: legal claims, court mediation, dation in payment (full cancellation of mortgage debt when a property is returned to the bank) and the right to relocation. It is argued that, in response to their being constructed by the state as legally incapable, evicted families and individuals are enacting themselves as activist citizens when (re)claiming their right to decent housing.

The threat that immigration poses to the so-called Western democratic values is increasingly the subject of public discourses, especially regarding Muslim migrants. We could label these discourses as neo-orientalist because of their willingness to refer to the (often Muslim) migrant as a savage, uncivilized, terrorist 'other'; in the words of Sartori, as an 'anti-citizen'. This article reflects how citizenship, following a contemporary logic of orientalism, has become a set of guidelines, discourses, practices and policies for the governance of migration. Indeed, these are the guidelines through which neoliberal globalization liberalizes the free movement of citizens and 'westernized' foreign persons while deploying technologies of citizenship and border control against different subjects, regarded as eternal outsiders, or even aliens, because of their supposed incivility, threat or un-integrability. The ultimate purpose of this article is to argue that if we are to arrive at a model of citizenship beyond orientalism, there is a need to abandon the current orientation which inspires border and citizenship regimes.

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Over the past two decades, the creation of the European border regime has increasingly sparked acts of protest and resistance by immigrants and led to the creation of initiatives to defend immigrant rights. This activism has provoked many European states to formalize what is known in the literature as ‘crimes of solidarity’ in their legal systems. Taking the Spanish case as an example, the objective of this article is to analyse the ‘crimmigration’ of protest and activism defending the rights of irregular immigrants at Europe’s southern border. This analysis describes the development and implementation of the repressive tactics employed by the state against activists, including forms of police control of protests, informal and formal dissuasion techniques, and the use of administrative and criminal sanctions. This work provides valuable insight into the practical impact of these crimmigration processes, particularly how they have affected activists, social organizations and immigrants, as well as how they have extended beyond the territory of the state (externalizing punishment).

Spain is one of the few countries in the EU where Islam has had a historical role in the social and cultural construction of its identity. However, its modern history is marked by acts of repudiation of non-Christian cultures. Opinion polls indicate that certain groups of immigrants from North Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe, but mainly Muslims, are considered to be incompatible with the popular conception of Spanish identity. The reason for this perception is related to the social construction of the immigrant as the ‘other to govern’ by political, academic and media discourses. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that immigration law also plays a fundamental role in this strategy of ‘orientalisation’, namely the attribution of certain qualities to immigrant groups (illegal, antisocial, criminal, inassimilable, terrorist), the aim of which is to legitimise the selective control of immigration. The Spanish immigration and citizenship regime contributes to the construction of otherness, and therefore to the political and legal (re)definition of what ‘being Spanish’ means.