SPANISH COASTGUARDS picked up a record 229 would-be immigrants from an ocean-going fishing boat off the Canary Islands last week. It was the largest shipload so far to survive the perilous illegal migration route from north Africa to Spain.

They arrived just as crisis-hit Europe tries to close the door on immigrants. Attitudes against those seeking a foothold in a flagging economy are hardening in Spain. Debate rages about how to deal with those already here.

Those rescued on Monday came from several African countries, and included 20 children. Some collapsed with cold and exposure and were carried ashore on stretchers following four days on treacherous seas, an expensive voyage probably planned for months.

Juan Antonio Corujo, head of the Red Cross in the Canary Islands, said: "Such a large fishing boat could not have set off from the shore directly into the sea. This boat must have been loaded from a pier, or probably smaller boats took people to the boat once it was at sea."

Another 100-strong boatload landed on Tuesday, as thousands flocked across Africa to the Mauritanian port of Nouadibou to join the exodus. Those rescued on Monday told Red Cross workers that they were "the first of many hundreds hiding along the Mauritanian coast ready to set sail in coming days".

Most will be flown straight back home, if they confess where they're from and if Spain has a repatriation agreement with their country of origin. Spain has repatriated 105 planeloads of undocumented immigrants this year, Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, the interior minister, said last week.

And for those who manage to stay, jobs are disappearing fast. Sadio Keita, 28, a lorry driver from Guinea, was lucky to survive the hazardous boat trip from Senegal to the Canary Islands last year, but was unlucky to arrive just as Spain's economy started to dip.

"I have not found any work at all," said Keita, speaking at an immigrant reception centre run by a Jesuit foundation in Madrid. "If I had known it would be like this, I wouldn't have come."

Other immigrants find it equally hard to find work, as Spain whisks away the welcome mat. Javier Medina, a Chilean machine operator, lost his job installing air conditioners when the property bubble burst and the building sector collapsed. "The economic crisis is the cause," he said.

During its 12-year boom, Spain became the EU's biggest importer of workers, from north Africa, South America and eastern Europe. They poured in for jobs as builders, waiters and care workers in a thriving economy - last year nearly five million immigrants lived legally in Spain, hundreds of thousands illegally.

Now the government urges them to go home, under a controversial plan approved by parliament last week. Jobless immigrants will be offered unemployment benefit in advance if they agree to return home and not come back for three years. Some 165,000 are eligible, but officials think only 10,000 will accept.

Spain's tough-talking labour minister, Celestino Corbacho, provoked criticism by proposing last week that immigrants could bring their parents to Spain only after five years' residence, instead of one year at present. Amnesty International condemned the plan as a "curtailment of immigrants' rights".

Corbacho was already under fire after he announced last month that the government would minimise the recruitment of African workers at source and give priority to Spanish workers. The deputy prime minister, Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega, insisted there was no such plan, and the minister backtracked.

Behind this apparent muddle lay a fierce conflict of pressures. Corbacho feels the heat from some unions, and public opinion, as unemployment hovers around 12%, the highest for 11 years. De la Vega, meanwhile, faces outrage from farmers whose grapes, strawberries and olives threatened to rot in the fields through lack of pickers, and from social services and hotels facing the collapse of operations staffed overwhelmingly by immigrants.

De la Vega stresses the socialist government's commitment to tolerance towards those from poor countries seeking a better life in Spain - Spaniards have a collective memory as a nation of migrants themselves during the years of General Franco's dictatorship. Socialist and conservative governments have each conducted amnesties to legalise hundreds of thousands of incomers. The reasoning was pragmatic: it meant a vast jump in tax and social security contributions, and suited employers in a booming market.

But humane policies are out of tune with a nation traumatised at the speed of its economic downturn, and with the mood in Europe. The EU last week banned amnesties as likely to attract more immigrants.

Some immigrants crammed into slum suburbs vented their despair in violence last month in the Mediterranean town of Roquetas de Mar, when four Africans were arrested in riots after a Senegalese man was fatally stabbed. Such clashes, rare in racially relaxed Spain, signal mounting tension.