This survey focuses on the immigration phenomenon in Spain and its impact on contemporary Spanish society. Studying how numerous immigrants have been settling in Spain is a way to account for the evolution of Spanish society: on the one hand by analysing how and why a country that traditionally used to export its labour-force could attract immigrants; and on the other hand by examining how Spain has been managing these influxes. This phenomenon shall be approached thanks to the case of Romanian women. For the last couple of years, Romanians have been the largest group of foreign nationals in Spain. I shall herein set to describe the various stages and characteristics of Romanian immigration in Spain, as well as report on a survey conducted with Romanian women. Through their experience, I thus wish to highlight some important aspects of contemporary Spanish society, insofar as they are relevant to this society's attitude towards new issues, and the solutions it brings out. So as to display the full diversity of Romanian immigration, I shall focus on some specific cases such as: the immigration of Roma women, but also the situation of women at risk, like victims of prostitution rings, or Romanian women being detained in Spanish prisons. Moreover, it seems to me just as important to find out what image Spanish society has been forming about immigrants, and especially about Romanians, thanks to the analysis of a body of media material dealing with the period going from the end of the 1990s to 2013, and thus completing this study of Romanian immigration. In the 1950s, a very different type of migration was reaching Franco's Spain, in other words: exile into Spain, a subject which I turn to, still rarely touched upon or being researched into. This study which centres primarily on immigration into Spain, also briefly draws a comparison with the situation in France, in order to examine what may or may not be similar in Romanian women's experience of migration in Spain or France.
