The floodgates have opened, and now the racists are barking openly, without hesitation or hypocrisy. We could be grateful for their sincerity if their words weren't spread everywhere and poisoned coexistence. They represent, from every perspective, a security problem for those they publicly point out. There will be those who don't feel challenged by this increase in violence, both verbal and physical, because they believe it has nothing to do with them and will remain silent, as in that text by Martin Niemöller on the rise of Nazism: "First they came after the socialists, and I didn't say anything because I'm not a socialist..." The rest already know it. Well, now they're coming for the immigrants, and there are those who not only remain unfazed by this scandalous xenophobia but who, in no time, join in stoking the sacrificial bonfire where people they neither know nor want to know are burning.
If we listen carefully to what Alberto Núñez Feijóo has been spouting these days (a servitude of the job of opining on racism that, I confess, I must ration so as not to fall ill), we will see that the Spanish right (and also the Catalan one) is living in a kind of schizophrenia regarding immigration. It needs it and knows it, because the productive fabric cannot sustain itself without foreign labor, but it doesn't want it. Or, more than not wanting it, it wants it subdued and on very short leashes, as the ruling classes in the working classes have always wanted. Only now the employers willing to exploit these new pariahs have the invaluable help of other workers who, amnesiac regarding their proletarian origins, believe that their enemy is the slightly poorer poor people next to them, and not the large extractive oligopolies. That if housing becomes more expensive, it is because of immigration and not because of tourism, for example. And that precariousness is the fault of the newcomers and not of the legislative changes that have led to more temporary employment and fewer wage increases. It's perverse to pit two sectors of workers against each other in what seems like the Hunger Games, but it seems that the populist tactic of "divide and conquer" still works. Now the Galician politician, with Vox breathing down his neck, is rushing to take a hard line on immigration, even though he knows perfectly well that without it, there's no present or future, and the economy can't be sustained. That's why this type of casting for foreign workers is now being invented, which, in some way, already exists. There are countries from which you can enter Spain without a visa, and others with insurmountable bureaucratic walls (easily torn down if you can show a few figures in your bank account). A Latin American person needs two years of residence in the country to apply for nationality, while someone coming from a much more recent former colony, such as northern Morocco, needs 10 years. So the discourse now being spread by the People's Party (PP), according to which people from Hispanic countries share the same culture as peninsular people, is already part of the legal system and is nothing new. It's a vision of the culture of others that homogenizes it and assimilates it to that of the motherland, even though the American nations have long since distanced themselves from imperialist domination. We don't know if Feijóo has the slightest idea of what cultural diversity is on the other side of the Atlantic, or if he has realized that, as Mediterraneans, a Spaniard is more like a Moor than a Mexican. But now it must be a pain to conquer other lands to acquire the much-needed cheap labor. It's easier to import it and, once here, subject it to specific rules, lest they think that, in addition to being workers, they are people. As happened on the plantations of a few centuries ago.
