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This article presents a reply to a commentary made on the article "Immigration to Spain: Implications for a Unified European Union Immigration Policy." Geographies of reference define how we view and analyze political problems. The importance of terminology is highlighted by the commentary and what implications demography itself will have on a unified European Union (EU) immigration policy. If we use immigrant to refer to individuals entering the EU, then EU citizens are no longer immigrants but citizens changing geographic location within the territory adhering to the EU. EU citizens are no longer immigrants whose movement across borders within the EU can be "controlled" by Spanish immigration policy. Nevertheless, everyone who is not a Spanish citizen is still a foreigner in Spain. Perhaps after reading too much Euro-literature, I had come to believe quite unreflectively that Spain is a unit of Europe and that Europeans or EU citizens in Spain are no longer immigrants. This idea is a reflection of a distinction that is not clearly delineated in speech but is in policy practice between immigrants originating within the EU and those originating from beyond the EU. Further distinctions in Spanish policy circles are made between economic immigrants from impoverished countries and immigrants from wealthier non-EU countries. The classification of EU citizens as foreign national and immigrant is ambiguous. In the Spanish census, EU citizens are included as foreign nationals.

This article comments on the article "Immigration to Spain: Implications for a Unified European Union Immigration Policy," by Laura Huntoon. I have to start by saying that the article has aroused my interest, and the topic, being of a political nature, has received less attention in the journals devoted to migration or social sciences in Spain. The article is not fundamentally demographic or does not have data as its central focus. And this is fortunate, given the low level of accuracy with which this question has been usually treated. I reckon, as some European documents do, that data on migrations are not at the level of other statistics on population studies. However, this should not be a problem, for there are several sources of data and each of them is adequate for a certain study or topic. In this work, "Dirección General de Migraciones," has been consulted, but not its publications. Data drawn from census data should refer to the institution that publishes the data. If, actually, the data correspond to the "Dirección General de Migraciones,"the data would be different. The author is right when she states that the proportion is low. The author does not demonstrate that return migration has grown since 1986, and that it showed the same or lower levels in the three previous years. The analysis of the workers from outside the European Union differs from that of the active population of foreign origin, of which there also exist available data.