The Catalonia that does not exist

Now that the Eleventh of September has passed and we have returned to talking about country, coexistence and a single people, a less solemn and more uncomfortable exercise is convenient. Let us imagine, for a moment, another Catalonia. Not an ideal country, but a country that would have understood that every arrival forced an update to the social pact. Immigration was not a passing emergency: it challenged the school, housing, work, language, rights and the very idea of citizenship.Let us imagine that governments had understood that welcoming is not just about registering, processing papers, or ritually celebrating diversity. Welcoming means ensuring that those who arrive can live with dignity, participate on equal terms, and define the shared country. It was necessary to abandon the vertical logic—some receive and others must show gratitude—and build a horizontal integration. Immigrant people would not have been treated only as a workforce or cultural difference, but as political subjects.Imagine if school segregation had been effectively combated, including in its racial dimension. We would not have centers that concentrate all the complexity while others remain on the sidelines. The children would have shared classrooms, playgrounds, and expectations; they would have grown up as equals, not learning that there are schools for those from here and for those from away. Perhaps today it would be harder to convince them that their neighbors are a threat.Imagine if housing had been considered a central immigration policy. That the public stock had been expanded and discrimination fought. Avoiding concentration would not have meant dispersing people, but rather distributing affordable housing, services, and opportunities throughout the territory. The problem is not that immigrant people live together, but that they can only live where inequality confines them.Let us imagine that it had not become normalized for a part of the population to remain trapped in the most precarious jobs. Qualifications would have been recognized and exploitation pursued. Work would have been a path to autonomy and recognition, not a permanent mechanism of subordination.Let us imagine a democratic secularism that guarantees, with the same criteria, the freedom to believe, not to believe, and to express one's convictions. A secularism capable of distinguishing the criticism of a doctrine from suspicion towards Muslim people. The problem is not debating Islam, but demanding that it demonstrate its compatibility with democracy and belonging to the country.

Let us imagine if immigrant children and adolescents had been treated, first and foremost, as children and adolescents. Not as a threat or a dehumanizing acronym. They would have received protection and a dignified transition into adult life. The administration would not have left them exposed after having assumed their guardianship.Let us also imagine a bold linguistic policy, outside of school. The Government would have made companies co-responsible for offering training in Catalan during working hours, making it a real language of relationship and promotion. Learning Catalan would have been an effective right, not a test of loyalty or an individual burden after precarious working days. Defending the language and guaranteeing rights would have been one and the same policy of cohesion.Let us imagine, among many other things, that Catalonia had recognized racism as a structural and institutional problem, not as a sum of insults or hate crimes. This would have forced a review of the apparently neutral practices that unequally distribute rights, security, and opportunities. And it would have required guaranteeing the presence of immigrants and their descendants in decision-making spaces, recognizing them not as people who only have to adapt, but as subjects with the right to transform the society of which they are already a part.This Catalonia does not exist. There have been advances, but not a sustained and transversal policy. There have been fragmentary reception policies and, above all, a concern for culture: what they eat, what they wear, what religion they have, what language they speak. We have culturalized immigration to avoid the decisive question: what rights, what material conditions, and what power were we willing to share?All of this would not have made the far right disappear. Vox and Aliança Catalana have their own responsibilities. But their strength does not arise from nothing: it grows upon segregations, inequalities, and abandonments that institutions have motivated or tolerated. Wherever politics does not guarantee equality or explain social conflicts, the far right points out culprits. It does not always invent racist frameworks; often, it finds them already prepared.If the homework had been done when it should have been, perhaps Vox and Aliança Catalana would still exist, but they would not find such fertile ground. We are still in time, if we stop competing with their language and act on the conditions that make it possible: rights, equality, redistribution, shared Catalan, political participation, and institutional anti-racism. After so much proclamation about the country we want to be, the question is whether this time we will do what is necessary.