Recognizing the invisible

Every now and then, a rumor would reach me: "They're about to open, they'll open soon," and I wouldn't understand a thing. For the papers, they'd say, they'll open for the papers, and that meant they'd give them to those who didn't have them. That people's administrative legality depended on such a mundane verb, one that applies to doors, made me raise an eyebrow in skepticism, but bureaucratic language is transferred to everyday speech in useful and effective similes and metaphors. That they would "open" the papers meant there would be an extraordinary regularization of immigrants. As the young interpreter I was, I also had to learn to find the correspondences between the language of the legal system and the words chosen by family and neighbors to refer to it. In any case, when it was announced that they would "open," a feeling of euphoria and joy spread, along with the hope of achieving legal status, having rights, paying into the system, and, above all, leaving behind the possibility of being taken to an immigration detention center or being deported. Although there are no specialized brigades here like the US ICE, not having a residence permit means always living on the margins, in the insecurity of the outcast, treading on perpetually unstable ground. Administrative vulnerability is vulnerability even if the person has a roof over their head and a job. The status of being undocumented entails a specific vulnerability, which is exploited by all kinds of predators.

Now the Spanish government has announced an extraordinary regularization program, which will bring significant relief to hundreds of thousands of people forced to live in invisibility. It is not, as the xenophobic far right claims, a call for those who are not here to come, but rather the recognition of the very existence of those who have been living here for some time. The real draw, in fact, is the availability of work in Europe, not whether it's legal or illegal. Those who oppose regularization seem to prefer undocumented immigrants, outside the bounds of labor laws, exploitable, and without rights. Who benefits from having masses of forced labor accepting lower wages and more precarious conditions than other workers? Who benefits from the desperation that comes with administrative illegality? Not those who claim to be concerned about the strength of the welfare state or the erosion of labor rights. It's no coincidence that José María Aznar carried out the most extraordinary regularizations, not because he was particularly concerned about the immigrants in question, but because he knew perfectly well that without newcomers there would be no economic progress. Something that today's right-wing parties, both Catalan and Spanish, don't vehemently defend in their public speeches for fear of being labeled as...immigrantsInsecure about the pressure that clogs their right-wing political spectrum, they know they need immigrants but can't say it clearly, and that's where this kind of discursive schizophrenia comes from. "Let them come, yes," they say from the People's Party (PP), "but only those whose culture is more similar to 'ours.'" They thus erase the very diversity that characterizes Spanish society while assimilating all of Latin America's, as if being from Madrid were the same as being Mexican, Castilian as Peruvian. The lost empire still lingers in this colonizing language. Here, they might consider us less oppressive, more reasonable in our treatment of the workers needed to fuel the productive machinery of sectors that don't particularly inspire the "natives," if we didn't say yes, let them come, but let them integrate. As if people could erase everything they are and leave it at the border, as if only the strength of their arms and backs could be imported.