Feijóo and 'El Mundo': first the locals... or the Hispanics

While the left struggles to offer a discursive (let alone executive) response to the challenges posed by immigration, the hardline right is shaping the news agenda and pushing the boundaries of what's acceptable. This Friday, The World It opened its front page with this headline: "Feijóo calls for "culturally close" migration and giving preference to Hispanic heritage." We pause for just three seconds to speculate what the tone of this news would be, and what verbs would have been used, if any leader of Junts had said this, in their attempt to avoid losing shovelfuls of votes now filtering into the Catalan Alliance. By some magic trick, anything a Catalan says is xenophobic (and I'm certainly frightened by some of the statements that have been made lately); if Hispanic heritage is invoked, then nothing happens and there's no problem in adopting a clearly ethnicist policy that distinguishes between good and bad immigrants. They don't call them that, which is ugly, but the gaze and the prejudice are clear. The tragedy is that the left bows its head and is still in denial, incapable even of admitting the tensions associated with migratory pressure.

A few months ago it was theAbc who said in an editorial that "orderly and safe immigration" was necessary and that it could be achieved "by choosing the most suitable human and professional profiles for the general interest and coexistence." There's a lot of talk about the do-goodism of the left, but we should also talk about the do-goodism of the right: those who believe that the cheap labor needed by the service sector can be imported without accepting that extreme precariousness encourages some individuals—because of poverty, not because of evil nature or origin—to turn to crime. And this is a magnificent lily in the hand, because it doesn't pay the price of ridicule on the networks.