Spanish TV offers immigrants pop star fame chance

MADRID (Reuters Life!) - A new TV talent show is offering millions of immigrants in Spain the chance to become the next Shakira or Enrique Iglesias.

In January those selected from 4,000 immigrant applicants to state television's "Sons of Babel" hope to swap their more usual jobs as builders and checkout operators for a more glamorous occupation, the organizers said on Wednesday.

Like other reality show formats, Sons of Babel will track the progress of the candidates who will live together as they prepare for a musical career.

But it will also investigate the candidates' lives before they came to Spain and will set up and sponsor development projects in their home countries in which viewers can participate.

The bulk of Spain's Latin American and Moroccan residents arrive seeking a new life to support their impoverished families back home. Most end up doing the kind of jobs Spaniards do not want, with skilled and unskilled workers alike employed in unskilled posts.

Many of those competing were musicians before they left their home county, Carlos Lopez, who created the program, told reporters.

"This is a music program with musicians, artists that have had to work as cashiers or laborers," he said.

"In the castings we have seen people singing their own songs which will undoubtedly become big hits," said one of the program's musical producers, Fernando Montesinos.

Spain has registered about four million immigrant residents since 2000, about 10 percent of the population, compared with less than one percent at the start of the 1990s.

Most are from Morocco, Latin America and Eastern Europe.

With Sons of Babel, state television's TVE1 is hoping to repeat the success of "Operacion Triunfo", Spain's first talent show of this kind which won massive audience shares for TVE in 2001, although it did not restrict competitors to immigrants.

(Reporting by Inmaculada Sanz; Writing by Elisabeth O'Leary, editing by Paul Casciato)