Laws and “Laws”
It’s a long and boring story—more boring than you can fathom. In as few words as possible: If you want to leave Spain while in the process of renewing your foreigner ID card, you supposedly need a special document to re-enter the country. It’s called an “autorización de regreso;” an authorization to return.
It’s not too difficult to get: You pay a $15 fee at a bank, take a train to a place in the suburbs, wait in line, present some documents, and they give you a certificate. Theoretically, you’re supposed to present that certificate at the passport control booth when you return to Spain.
But: The bigger a system gets, the more difficult it becomes to control. If you’ve ever played a game of Telephone, you get it. The more a message or edict gets relayed, from person to person, department to department, the more it gets jumbled. The more likely it is to get lost altogether, too. When you’re talking about a bureaucracy as big as a country with 50 million people, well, good luck keeping any message consistent.
The director of my program, for example, sent this in an email:
Getting deported is pretty harsh threat indeed.
Here’s an example from the Facebook group of foreigners in Spain.
Finally, here’s one of the moderators of the group, who recently advised us of an update to this very official, strict governmental policy:
In short: No one is clear on the law … which seems to change often … and which (by the way) hasn’t once applied to me. Seven times since I moved here in 2017, I’ve flown into Spain from another country. Five of those times, the passport control agent has done nothing more than glance at my passport and send me on my way.
Plenty of others have had the same luck. Not everyone. (It surely helps that I’m a white male and my passport was issued by the wealthiest country on Earth.)
But the fact remains: This regreso law is wildly inconsistent. It’s inconsistently interpreted, inconsistently enforced, sometimes completely ignored. And an inconsistent law is not a law at all.
There are laws in thermodynamics. There are laws in physics. Gravity is a law. It exists in perpetuity and never changes. If, even once, an apple hovered a foot above the ground after falling from a tree, gravity would no longer be a law.
This is a crucial distinction; it pervades every inch of modern society. Governments and police would like us to believe that bureaucratic, political decrees, constitutional amendments, county ordinances are laws; that they can and will be enforced as consistently as gravity.
But as Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson and the Eric Garner choking on Staten Island (bold mine):
Law-enforcement resources are now distributed so unevenly, and justice is being administered with such brazen inconsistency, that people everywhere are going to start questioning the basic political authority of law enforcement. And they’re mostly going to be right to do it, and when they do, it’s going to create problems that will make the post-Ferguson unrest seem minor. …
Because you can’t send hundreds of thousands of people to court every year on broken-taillight-type misdemeanors and expect people to sit still while yet another coroner-declared homicide goes unindicted. It just won’t hold. If the law isn’t the same everywhere, it’s not legitimate. And in these neighborhoods, what we have doesn’t come close to looking like one single set of laws anymore.
When that perception sinks in, it’s not just going to be one Eric Garner deciding that listening to police orders “ends today.” It’s going to be everyone. And man, what a mess that’s going to be.
I agree with him on all of that—until the last sentence.
It’s not going to be a mess at all; the breaking of political so-called laws—the reordering of the status quo—is the bulk of human history itself! Which advancements in philosophy, science, medicine, or any other field resulted from a diligent following of established norms?
Not one.
How, then, will I approach this regreso nonsense the next time I leave and re-enter Spain? The same way the CB radio was developed. From Samuel Edward Konkin’s Agorist Primer:
In the middle 1970s, the federal State passed a regulation imposing a maximum speed limit on U.S. highways of 55 mph. With the threat of cutting federal funds to states and counties, the entire driving population decelerated to a creeping crawl. Or did it?
Consider the following calculation: at 55 mph a trucker can drive 55 miles in an hour, 550 miles in ten hours and 2200 miles in 40 hours. At an aver- age of 70 mph, he makes 700 miles in ten hours and 2800 miles in 40 hours.
To make it even clearer, assume that the trucker nets $1000, after costs, for each 600 mile run.
He makes four runs legally for $4000 in an easy week, or $5000 by extending his hours or work- ing weekends. At 70 mph he makes $5000 for the (roughly) 40 hour week.
With that type of incentive, the race went to the swift and the “double nickel” speed limit was scofflawed. But being caught could wipe out that advantage. Suppose fuel were consumed at a rate that cost an extra $200 at the higher speed, and you received an average one of $200. Four busts a week and it’s no longer worth it.
Along came Citizen’s Band Radio. Put $200 or $400 once into a CB radio investment, reduce your busts to once a week, and you’re back in business. And that, of course, is what happened. Truckers “spotted” for each other, formed convoys, and thwarted the State’s “Smokey Bear” highwaymen.
It’s the same way Henry David Thoreau opposed the Mexican-American War and slavery: by peacefully refusing to abide by an unjust, inconsistent, so-called law. He withheld his tax money.
I’m saying adios to the regreso; not even gonna bother worrying about it. Maybe I get deported. Most likely, I face no consequences. And I hope others do the same, for when enough people refuse to follow illegitimate laws, those laws cease to exist.
If you enjoyed reading this — and even if you didn’t — you should check out my book, Ticketless: How Sneaking Into The Super Bowl And Everything Else (Almost) Held My Life Together.
