The country's internal political debate has decidedly focused on the immigration issue. Calling it a "debate" is perhaps too delicate a way of describing it, because the terms of the discussion range from exhausting and paralyzing low-key bickering to broad insults that exasperate and make one lose control. A dialectic that leaves relatively little room for thoughtful and reasonable dialogue. Immigration, which for some is the mother of all evils and for others the path to redemption from all our misfortunes, polarizes public conversation and seems to determine future parliamentary political representation above all other axes of confrontation.
This is a dynamic that is usually reduced to a useless "yes" or "no" to immigration, which, moreover, is impossible to translate into management terms because the rules of the game do not belong to us. The fact, however, is that this simplistic reduction hides a whole group of truly relevant deliberations that should concern us. First, the productive model that attracts immigrants because it needs them. Add to this the demographic changes, particularly aging and the low birth rate. The housing crisis, whose scarcity, like a domino, means that when a piece topples in a corner, the movement spreads to seemingly unrelated extremes. That is, the overcrowding of newcomers on a tiny tenth floor without an elevator increases demand and reaches, without interruption, the student who cannot afford a room or the child who cannot leave home.
Even more so. The polarization in the immigration debate is a consequence of the collapse and impotence of public services, particularly health and school services, in which the immigrant is both an involuntary cause and an innocent victim. An impact that everyone bears, albeit in a "democratic" way. From emergency services that resemble a field hospital at war in any school where attention to diversity swallows up all the attention in the curriculum. And what can we say about the mistakes of certain well-intentioned social policies that failed to foresee their unintended consequences? Or about the realities of public safety seen through enhanced perception glasses.
Unfortunately, all this unrest is being exploited for vile partisan purposes. I won't discuss the delusional ideas of Commons MP David Cid in this very newspaper ("There are 8 million of us, and if there are 10, even better.", September 19) because two days later Miquel Puig did it emphatically in "The Dystopia of 10 Million". But it is unavoidable to call Podemos's assumption of state immigration powers, as demanded by Junts, a sign of racism, miserable. In any case, the only possible racism—apart from their own toward Catalans—is that which already exists in the very Spanish laws, the enforcement of which they are demanding. How repugnant is the indifference these insults deserve from those who should applaud the assumption of these powers. The undisguised desire to link Junts to the ideology of the Catalan Alliance is one of the most perverse attempts in current Catalan and Spanish politics. But we all know that partisanship erodes all political decency.
Adding to this climate of confusion is the fact that immigration continues to be discussed as if we were in the last century. The old, still common categories of debate do not fit the new realities. How can we continue to talk frivolously about the "integration" of immigrants when the profile of the host society has become so heterogeneous? How can we think that hate speech is the cause of almost nothing, but the harsh living conditions and frustrated expectations they cause? Why does a colonial mentality not count those who come from Spain when calculating foreigners and immigrants? What's the point of continuing to deny obvious facts that everyone sees on the street—and yes, they hurt—supposedly to avoid prejudice and stigma, when what they do is precisely create and fuel a climate of greater suspicion and distrust?
That the problem is not the far right but what makes it grow should be obvious. Here and everywhere. And that we need to be able to courageously recognize what real problems it feeds on, and not confuse them with those it cleverly or foolishly disguises itself as—another obvious fact. But let me end with a call for hope. If at one time, fifty years ago, with as many or more difficulties, we Catalans were able to think about immigration with an advanced ethical and political intelligence, in terms that cauterized social and human wounds, why can't we do it again?
