Andreu Domingo: "What Sílvia Orriols defends is the most direct path towards minority status"

BarcelonaForty years now, Andreu Domingo (Saus, Alt Empordà, 1958), a sociologist and professor at the UAB, has been analysing Catalan demography from the Centre for Demographic Studies, of which he is deputy director. At a time when migration is the focus of political debate around the world, we asked him about the keys to the transformation of Catalan society, the impact of the decline in Catalan and reactionary phenomena such as that of the Aliança Catalana in Ripoll.

Sixty years ago, Catalonia experienced a great wave of migration. Between 1950 and 1980, one and a half million citizens from the rest of the State arrived in the country. Can this be compared to the current situation?

— The reasons why people emigrate are the same: to improve their lives or those of their families. And the way they emigrate is also similar, because they follow the economic cycle. In the 20th century there were two great waves, the one at the beginning of the century until the Crash of 29 and the one that began in the 1950s until the oil crisis of 1973, which arrived here after the Moncloa Pacts, in 1977. The same has happened with international immigration in the 21st century. The first wave lasted until the recession of 2007 and the second began in 2014, with a break due to the pandemic.

What is not similar?

— In the last century, people came from the rest of Spain and had the same rights (or lack of rights in the case of the dictatorship), and this is no longer the case with international immigrants. Their situation is also diverse, because Spanish legislation discriminates positively against some [Latin Americans] and not against others. Nor is it similar in intensity: the waves are very short but very intense. And thirdly, while the first two waves, especially the second, coincided with a baby boom, the last two coincide with a process of aging, caused by low fertility and an increase in life expectancy. This changes above all the weight that the migratory balance has as a component of population growth. The most that migrations ever weighed at the peak of the 60s was 60%. On the contrary, at the peak of the first wave of the 21st century it was 90% of growth. And in the second wave, 100%. All the growth that occurs is due to migration.

This also increases the weight of the migrant population in relation to the total population.

— Yes. The foreign population was 22.4% in 2023, which is a lot; it is in the high range compared to other EU countries. And if you take the millennial generation [born between 1986 and 1995] the number of foreign-born people rises to 40%. This had already happened, because in 1971 the percentage of those born outside Catalonia was 54%. The important thing is that this has an effect on the language and on the birth rate.

Of course, the age groups with the most immigrants are those between 25 and 44 years old, which is the reproductive age.

— From 2007 to the present, the birth rate of foreign mothers has remained within a range of 20,000 to 22,000 births. What happens is that the birth rate of native mothers has dropped from 64,000 to less than half, so that births to foreign mothers have dropped from 18% to 40%. If we look at families, 40% of children from 0 to 4 years old born in Catalonia already have one or both parents born abroad. Politicians say that we should prepare for diversity when we are already a multicultural country. The younger generations already have diversity as an idiosyncratic trait.

However, there is a certain feeling of surprise or rejection at the rapid transformation of society. Were we not prepared there, as citizens?

— The volume has been enormous. With the first boom of this century, Spain was the second country in the world in absolute numbers of foreigners, only behind the United States. And the second boom was greater than the first. The other thing that has been phenomenal is the speed of everything. People's reaction has to do with the speed with which their world, the neighborhood, the landscape has changed, and that is something that is hard to digest.

Why has so many people arrived?

— For two reasons. One, because of the demand of the labour market, because we have a production model with low added value that calls for intensive labour for unskilled employment. The other reason has been because of domestic work and care of people, which has been outsourced mainly to Latin American women, who are very poorly paid. In other words, it has been the cheapest way of reproducing the middle classes of Catalonia and of young people. Then there are other reasons: the call of the real estate market, the call of the climate for a certain lifestyle, which gives the expats, the retired people who can afford it... And then there are the refugees.

Immigrants arrive in a more segregated, atomized society, where the social elevator does not work as well, and a society that is more Castilianized by previous waves. All this also impacts on the reception and the language.

— The problem is not migration or low birth rates. The problem with the language is that we Catalans do not master the mechanisms of social reproduction.

Because?

— There are political and economic reasons that nobody talks about and that are structural. What we are doing is placing all the responsibility on the individual – on the Catalan speaker, who is racist if he doesn't speak Catalan and if he does, he is also racist, or on the immigrant who doesn't speak Catalan – and that is going to end badly. The challenge we have is how we organize ourselves to defend the language in a state that is against it and in autonomous regions that do nothing but raise awareness or punish, impose fines, and that leads nowhere.

And what should they do?

— Many people who are now crying about Catalan and the parties that are indignant and say that immigration must be controlled because this is unsustainable, are the same ones who dedicated themselves to weakening and making precarious sectors as important for social reproduction as health and school. The same ones who say that linguistic immersion has not worked are those who ruined the funding for schools. Or in health, making Catalan nurses leave for London so that they could come from other places. The precariousness of the public sector has taken away the prestige of Catalan along the way.

And he spoke of economic reasons.

— Because the basis of the Catalan social reproduction system was the language, it was the anthropological mark and also the emblem of upward social mobility. If the economic system restricts upward social mobility to the values of a competitive individual and not to a social group or class, what you are doing is undermining the importance of the language. If you were a migrant, since the 1960s it made sense to learn Catalan, and not so much for you and your children. Now there is not so much mobility, but you also find that Spain and your Spanish-speaking co-workers tell you that it will be of no use to you and, in addition, you find a number of Catalan speakers who tell you that it is your fault.

So, the two elements that must be recovered to recover the language are prestige and social mobility?

— Yes, they are fundamental. First, we must believe that migrants are part of Catalonia. We are a nation of immigrants: 73% of the people who live here are directly or indirectly the product of immigration.

That is why the rejection of immigration is paradoxical when three out of four Catalans are a result.

— If we talk about the right-wing national populists of Ripoll, what Silvia Orriols defends is the most direct and quickest path towards minority status. First, because in Catalonia migrations have been an endogenous factor to the Catalan demographic system for at least a century and a quarter. When they say they want to represent the essence of the people, they want to represent something that does not exist. This tradition they invent that the Catalan is the son of Guifré el Pilós... this has not worked like this, it does not represent the demographic, economic, political, cultural, or identity history of Catalonia. Secondly, if you do not count on migrants as future Catalans, you become minority because we would be in a minority. And what you do is put them on their ass, making it impossible for there to be any kind of understanding between them and Catalan culture. This is not a solution for the future, it is an acceleration of the most agonising situation of the Catalan.

Do you think there is a risk of social fracture?

— Talking about immigration in any country, not just in Catalonia, is a way of talking about who you are, what your identity is. And it is a project for the country. Not only the extreme right groups, but the entire right has now subscribed to the discourse that the blame lies with do-goodism. They do this to wrap things up. The left has indeed been at fault, but because it has swallowed for many years this discourse on neoliberal diversity, in which it was good for migrants to arrive because they made us more competitive. And we have experienced this in Barcelona and throughout Catalonia, promoted by institutions of all political colours, including the left.

Do you think that language, in this context, can regain ground?

— If I make the effort to think positively, which is very difficult for me, I think we have the predisposition of the migrants themselves, although There is not enough course offering for people who want to learn Catalan. There are still areas in which knowing Catalan is an advantage for a foreign migrant, and especially for their descendants. I know it seems very naïve, but I think it is necessary to fight against inequality, against discrimination. Racism does not just attack the dignity of the migrant, it endangers our future as a people.

Do you think there is a lack of a transformative national project for everyone?

— Yes. What made so many migrants from the rest of Spain sign up in the 1960s? What do we see in El 47? The transformative potential that begins in the neighbourhoods, in the anti-Franco struggles in which the new arrivals and the Catalans get involved. There are reasons to fight against an economic system that has increased inequality for everyone. The future is at stake, not just of a small country, but of Europe, of humanity.

The world is turning in another direction, I'm afraid. What worries you most about this world to come?

— Social stratification. I think that a new sub-layer has been created in the working class, marked by origin and skin colour. In this sub-layer, beneath everything else you have the African immigrant population. Another sub-class that has appeared is the lumpen of the native proletariat, who are the losers of globalisation, which would be –with all due respect– what in the United States is called white trashI think there is a lepenization, an adoption of the discourse of regression by a part of the working population, who previously voted for the left, and by the political classes, who are buying the same arguments.

There is an idea that people who are left out of the system should be abandoned.

— And the third thing I want to study, and what Mark Fischer says, is that there is a problem with class consciousness. We have gone from class consciousness to identity consciousness. This means that, translating it to Catalonia, although many of the children of the 60s' immigrants are promoted socially, they still have pride in the way they speak, the way they dress...

And to consider themselves charnegos.

— Among other things. This is a lack of class consciousness, and the neoliberal discourse of superdiversity has also achieved this. It has managed to divide the difference, domesticate it, separating it into identities and not into classes. Each of us is a source of consumption, we are all compartmentalized: women/Latinas/people of color, for example. This, in addition, creates political clientelism, as we see in the US with the Latino vote, the African-American vote... all encapsulated. This neoliberal discourse categorizes the population into identities and each one lives in their own bubble, competing with each other to see who is the biggest victim.