Juntos has done very well in claiming powers over immigration. The agreement reached with the PSOE has nothing racist about it, although the tactical reasons that have pushed Puigdemont's party have a lot to do with fear of competition from the Catalan far right. But it is not Junts, but the Generalitat, where the PSC now governs, that will have to assume the new powers. This is what counts.
That the Generalitat has greater decision-making power on a fundamental issue is good news for any Catalanist. It is a success of Junts' negotiating strategy. It is also praiseworthy that ERC has welcomed the agreement and has not fallen into the error of emulating the junteros when, too often, they ridicule or vilify the agreements of the Republicans with the PSOE. This has happened in the cases of Cercanías or financing. It is true that in these two issues the hottest thing is in the sink, but it is also true that the agreement on immigration is a simple delegation of powers, without regulatory capacity, which raises many questions about its scope. It is nothing new.
The recent survey on language use has put the health of Catalan at the centre of the debate, which has favoured Junts' narrative, at least in Catalonia: immigrants' access to Catalan should be both a requirement and a welcome. In a country as busy as ours, a foreigner who learns Catalan becomes just another Catalan. And this does not happen everywhere.
Linguistic incorporation is taken for granted in all normal countries, but since ours is not, such a claim has been ridiculed by the right-thinking left (El Gran Wyoming ironically said that immigrants should learn to dance sardanas and eat calçots), and by Ione Belarra, from Podemos, the same Belarra who was a minister in the Spanish government when the massacre at the Melilla fence took place.
Even the Spanish right dares to give lessons. García-Page (yes, I know he is from the PSOE) has expressed his "embarrassment"for the pact with Junts, which represents "the worst extreme right in Spain." Feijóo, of course, has warned that national unity is in danger. In this climate, the recent public penitence of Gabriel Rufián is even more painful, when he said that the independence movement had made a mistake "handing out impurity cards" to its adversaries.
That said, placing the responsibility for the Catalan situation on recent immigrants, who are clearly the weak link, is very unfair. Firstly, because many of them want to learn Catalan and cannot; secondly, because many Catalan speakers, after centuries of linguistic submission, give up Catalan prematurely to avoid inconvenience. On the other hand, we have in the country many thousands of citizens who have lived in Catalonia for 30, 40 or 50 years and have not learned even a smattering of Catalan for political reasons –"We are in Spain"–, which demonstrates a tremendous lack of empathy. Capturing the goodwill of these Spanish-speaking Catalans is crucial for the future of the language and for social cohesion.
If in the 1960s and 1970s, when the great waves of migration from the rest of Spain arrived, we had not been under Franco's regime but in an autonomous Catalonia, with official and normalized Catalan, cohesion would have been easier, as it has always been in Catalonia, in its long history of incorporating human capital. The challenge we face, therefore, is to prevent the posthumous victory of Francoism, and all the tools we can have at our disposal are welcome.
