Demoscopic poison to pave the way for the far right

No press poll is without intent. In election polls, the objective is usually very obvious and ranges from portraying a particular party as victorious to seduce voters who tend to vote for the winning horse, to fearing the possibility of generating a mobilization. This Saturday,The WorldThe newspaper ran with the following front-page headline: "Two-thirds of Spaniards believe immigrants don't integrate." The aim is evident: to legitimize harsh policies against those who come from outside. And it does so by conveying a mental framework typical of the far right, which divides between "us" and "them," with the cynicism that comes with scolding immigrants for not integrating while you maintain a narrative that precisely favors segregation. With the same data, the newspaper could have titled "Two-thirds of citizens believe that Spain does not integrate immigrants." There's no need to explain why it didn't do so, right?

Furthermore, the headline is biased, starting with the word "integration," which is debatable. What exactly does it mean? Is it used as a euphemism to demand that people renounce their identity of origin and not let it be obvious that they're immigrants? In the ideal formulation of the migration phenomenon, newcomers contribute to the economy and enrich the whole by bringing diversity without threatening the native culture. But there is no consensus on the gap between this ideal and reality. The left clung to the do-gooder version based on dogma, while the right, meanwhile, successfully exploited this gap. But many of their strategies are deceitful, Manichean, and stigmatizing. Asking the congregation whether immigrants integrate or not actually says more about the natives than about the newcomers, because we are talking about popular emotional perception and not substantiated analysis. The newspaper points the blame at them—"they just don't integrate"—but it burns its hands with the red-hot iron of prejudice.