The ARA (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance) has returned to the town of Torre Pacheco, in the province of Murcia, six months after the far right launched a campaign against Moroccan immigrants, incidents that marked a turning point in the xenophobic agenda in Spain. "There are no too many immigrants, there are too many racists," read a banner displayed a few days ago by Moroccan farmworkers during a labor protest in the town. Life in this town, as in so many others, is marked by segregation: locals and foreigners socialize in separate spaces. There is little interaction. The integration work carried out by schools and some associations is insufficient. Distance and mistrust persist, especially regarding the Muslim population: Islamophobia has taken root. The far right promotes it unfiltered on social media and is profiting from it, both in Spain and Catalonia, as well as in other parts of Europe. In fact, despite the diversity within the far right (for example, on gender issues), Islamophobia is the element that all continental far-right groups have in common.
Xenophobia against Islam has become an easily activated tool. enemy Identifiable, distinct in customs and beliefs, they are the ones to whom the most visible ills can be attributed, starting with insecurity or alleged abuses or favoritism by social services. Many members of immigrant Muslim communities tend to occupy the lowest rungs of the social and labor ladder, which makes them especially vulnerable to being singled out.
If we heed the verdict of the ballot boxes in Extremadura and Aragon, the Torre Pacheco incident has not prevented anti-immigrant rhetoric from gaining traction. Vox is enjoying electoral success, and in Catalonia, the polls favor Aliança Catalana. The inadequacy of basic services, strained for years by population growth and the slow recovery from cuts—especially in healthcare and education—combined with the identity factor—in the Catalan case, focused on the decline of the native language—ultimately fuels a blaming of the most recent arrivals, the missing link in the chain.
Although the business and economic world emphasizes the need for foreign labor in sectors such as tourism, agri-food, caregiving, and construction, and acknowledges that economic growth is largely attributable to the influx of workers from abroad, there is a segment of the population. A discourse that, of course, does not usually emphasize the so-called expadosHigh-income foreigners who, often, rather than being marginalized, live in self-segregation.
If we want to avoid new Torre Pachecos, we must talk about immigration in all its complexity. Only in this way can we dismantle the Manichean and simplistic discourse of the far right, which seeks scapegoats for entrenched problems such as an economic model too reliant on cheap labor, atavistic fears of difference, or the heartbreaking reality of young people who see their opportunities for advancement being cut off.
