Immigration: why it is necessary to stop it

The most precious asset of any society is its cohesion, and conversely, the worst threat is its fragmentation. The debate on immigration, which we are now beginning, must therefore focus on this issue.

We consider two aspects in which the current immigration dynamic is breaking social cohesion: housing and school.

Since 2000, Catalonia's population—driven exclusively by immigration—has grown by 1% annually, meaning that each year it has added the need for approximately 25,000 new homes. It is therefore not surprising that a recent study, authored by economists Miquel Morell, Agustí Jover, and Nil Ragàs, concludes that 20,000 subsidized housing units will need to be built annually in the coming decades.

It is true that in the first decade of the century that figure was easily surpassed. However, it is also true that this objective was achieved through private financing that did not correspond to the beneficiaries' ability to repay, so the public sector ended up having to pay for the construction by "bailing out" the financial institutions that had financed it.

Now, the Catalan government is promoting the construction of subsidized housing on public land—and therefore without impacting the price—and estimates that the construction cost requires a rent of €10.6/m². This, in turn, necessitates a perpetual subsidy of 33% for households with a gross annual income of €33,000. However, the vast majority of the jobs we are creating to attract immigrants—in tourism, domestic service, the meat industry, and many other sectors—are far from providing this income: the average salary in the tourism sector is €23,500, and, moreover, it is seasonal. In other words, we are generating jobs that must be filled by immigrants, but we are not paying them enough for workers to access decent housing, which requires public administrations to provide a wage supplement in the form of a housing subsidy.

If the population continues to grow at its current rate, and assuming the Catalan government's housing projects are successful, in ten years the government would need to allocate €750 million just to maintain the new stock of social housing, and the Catalan Finance Institute (which finances between 80% and 90% of these projects) would need to increase its balance sheet tenfold. If this weren't enough, mobilizing land at the necessary pace is highly questionable. Therefore, Morell, one of the aforementioned authors, concludes that "it is impossible to meet the real needs for social housing [...]. If we manage to build 5,000 units, it will be a great success." This is tantamount to saying that access to housing will continue to worsen unless population growth is halted. And this is true regardless of any interventions in the real estate market that we may approve.

Can we imagine a Catalonia with an even more strained housing market than it is now? Yes, of course. Is it possible to imagine that it will also maintain social cohesion? I don't think so.

The second aspect to consider is education. I sent my daughters to public schools, high schools, and universities. Now I watch as their generation chooses to send their children to schools with minimal immigrant presence. It horrifies me, but I can't criticize it, because it's clear that the performance of students in these "high-complexity" schools is not only low, but can only be anecdotal. However, if a housing shortage is the quickest way to disrupt social peace, a dual school system is the surest recipe for consolidating social division.

Addressing this issue requires abandoning the assumption that the children of recent immigrants lack special educational needs, which is what we implicitly do with the current enrollment system. It is well-documented that poverty is inherited and that the only way to break this cycle is by guaranteeing excellent access to the school system, particularly from early childhood. Since we are currently doing the opposite, what we are creating is a caste society, where the children of immigrants—whom we have attracted because they are inexpensive—will only have access to low-skilled jobs.

We often refer to immigration between 1950 and 1975. The differences with today are enormous. Back then, we attracted workers to put them in factories, where they earned enough to buy a house to pay off over ten years, which is how it was financed then.

The middle class can afford to ignore the problems posed by immigration because stopping it would bring us more than a few inconveniences. On the contrary, the main beneficiaries would be the immigrants themselves, among other things because we could finally start taking a more serious approach to their children.