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.

The images from Ceuta repeat a familiar scene: exhausted bodies emerging from the water, overwhelmed police forces, headlines speaking of an "influx" and an "emergency." For those who only look at the border when it appears on screens, it might seem like an exceptional episode. For those who know the trajectories of the people arriving there, it is the concentrated expression of a stable system: a mobility regime that turns the Mediterranean and El Tarajal into a filter of class, origin, and race.The metaphor of the "wave" is not innocent. It presents people as a threatening natural phenomenon – a mass to be contained – and erases faces, individual and collective biographies, and motives. A wave has no name or project; it only has volume and direction. This language prepares a specific political response: if what arrives is a depersonalized and depoliticized force, the imaginable response is no longer welcome or the guarantee of rights, but exception, containment, and closure. Violence thus appears as an almost natural reaction.But at the border there are no natural phenomena: there are political decisions. For decades, a combination of closing legal and safe routes, externalizing migratory control to neighboring countries, and global inequalities that facilitate the mobility of some and immobilize others has been in place. When a crack opens up — a change in Moroccan surveillance or a diplomatic crisis — a movement that already existed concentrates and becomes visible. We then call it a "crisis".The border functions as a political valve. It opens and closes according to power dynamics that rarely have to do with the concrete lives of the people who arrive there. In 2021, the presence or absence of Moroccan police in Ceuta was not just a technical matter of surveillance, but also an instrument of diplomatic pressure. Reducing everything to "mafias" or the "pull effect" avoids the essential question: who can regulate the porosity of this border, and in whose interests?

There is a test that can be done any evening of theater, concert, or dance festival in Catalonia: look at the audience. In many cases, almost all faces are of native people, from a recognizable middle class, even when they are children's shows. Then, we go out into the street, take the subway, and return to the plural reality of a country in which, in Barcelona or Girona, between 20% and 25% of the population has migratory origins. The question is inevitable: where have they stayed?

In a recent interview on TV3, Maria Teresa Cabré (president of the IEC) argued that, for Catalan to become a truly shared language, new approaches are needed. Among the ideas she proposed, one is particularly suggestive from the outset: hybridization. The proposal is clear: if Catalonia wants immigration to embrace Catalan, it is not enough to demand its learning; a good welcome is necessary, fostering a sense of belonging, and making real affection for the language possible.The idea, formulated like this, is difficult to reject. No society can aspire to turn its language into a common space if it is not capable of welcoming, recognizing, and incorporating. The problem, however, is not the goodness of the premise, but its insufficiency. The approach of hybridization emphasizes the relational and social dimension of the bond with the language, but it leaves in the background what is decisive today: the structural conditions in which immigrants, their descendants, and othered groups live.It is not enough to say that Catalan speakers must “permeabilize” themselves for there to be more interaction, more meeting, and, from there, more adherence to Catalan. This may work in some cases. But turning this intuition into a general answer is, at the very least, a simplification. It assumes that the distance between the language and a part of the population is, above all, a problem of lack of contact, when it is often the expression of a much deeper social fracture.In Catalonia, this fracture cannot be understood without racism. Not only in its explicit and xenophobic expression, but also in more diffuse, normalized, and difficult-to-identify forms, embedded in institutional practices, social expectations, collective imaginaries, and daily classifications. It is a racism that continues to operate, often without being recognized as such, even in spaces that think of themselves as committed to social justice. This blindness is not only moral: it is also epistemological, because it prevents understanding what happens with language in contexts of inequality. If immigrant and otherized people live more exposed to school, residential, and labor segregation, to discrimination in access to housing, to symbolic degradation in public representation, or to forms of selective secularism that fall mainly on certain religious groups, then the relationship with language cannot be thought of solely in terms of affective welcome.

The next elections in Catalonia are scheduled for May 2027, but the parties have already begun a campaign that starts well before the official calendar. Catalan politics, marked by collective frustration following the failure of the independence process, channels some of this discontent toward immigration, making it the focus of political debate. This construction of narratives shapes public perception long before the polls open, and the parties respond to the demands of a segment of the population calling for greater immigration control. Thus, the immigration debate becomes the axis around which the new boundaries of Catalan identity and social cohesion are projected and negotiated.

The controversy surrounding the theatrical performance Those Latinas at Barcelona City Hall has highlighted the complexity of linguistic coexistence and discrimination in Catalonia. Beyond the debate on the limits of humor and artistic freedom, this episode has highlighted the deep tensions surrounding language, integration, and structural racism. In a social context marked by collective frustration following the independence process, any issue related to language easily becomes a symbolic battleground, reflecting a growing sensitivity in Catalan society. In the work, presented during the Barcelona Observatory of Discrimination event, some sectors have accused him of Catalanophobia, while others defend it as a necessary critique of certain exclusionary attitudes.