The Catalan population has gone from 6.2 million in 2000 to 8.2 in 2026. This is an extraordinary growth in the European context that has put access to housing and school under strain; in the first case due to increased demand, and in the second due to the sudden alteration of the student body's cultural composition. This is not a completely unforeseen change, as in 2002 Idescat published projections whose "medium-high" scenario has proven surprisingly accurate, but it is also true that this figure was between a "low scenario" of 6.7 million and a "high scenario" of 8.9.The latest projection by Idescat – published in 2024 – states that the Catalan population will be between 8.1 and 9.9 million in 2050. This is a very wide range, as it means that the population could either begin to decline or continue to grow very rapidly. In this context, the Proencat document, which guides decarbonization policy, predicts it will be 8.6 million, below Idescat's 'medium scenario'.Proencat, which guides decarbonization policy, predicts it will be 8.6 million, below Idescat's 'medium scenario'.However, and for whatever reasons, what has become popular is the prediction that Catalonia will reach 10 million inhabitants in 25 years. Minister Sílvia Paneque ("Catalonia will soon have 10 million") and deputy Elena Díaz ("The Catalonia of 10 million is not unviable") have repeatedly referred to it; President Illa has also done so, albeit more cautiously. Deputy David Cid, from Catalunya en Comú, has referred to it as a scenario that is not only probable but desirable ("We are 8 million, and if we are 10, better"). On the other hand, Oriol Junqueras has considered it a less attractive scenario ("The priority is not to be 10 million").It is clear that the most important thing that has happened in Catalonia in the last 25 years is demographic growth; much more than the independence process, for example. Obviously, if in 2050 Catalonia has around 10 million inhabitants, demographic growth will again be the most important thing that has happened. Consequently, preparing for it (as proposed by Illa, Paneque or Díaz) is more than justified.

Integrate into what? Incorporate into where? Dissolve with whom? These are the big preliminary questions that would need to be answered about current migratory challenges. Questions that make us look at a point prior to demographic growth itself. I'm referring to being able to know what profile, what nucleus, what space of identification Catalonia, and the Catalan Countries, currently offer to a person migrating there. Can this migrant know where they have arrived if a good part of the natives themselves do not know the basic coordinates of the country where they have been living for years or have even been born?

The Fènix Report, in which I participated, has merited the attention of the media and many analysts, but no interest, for the moment, from those responsible for the country's economic policy. It must be said that, among those who have shown interest, the agreement on the diagnosis is very great. The prognosis, however, no one fully claims as their own. I think this is due, in part, to some misinterpretations, more or less intentional.

The Archbishop of Tarragona, Joan Planellas, attends to ARA from the Archbishop's Palace, seven years after taking office. He is also president of the Tarraconense Episcopal Conference, which brings together Catalan bishops.

The Supreme Court has put a stop to the government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso and Vox, and has rejected temporarily paralyzing the extraordinary regularization of immigrantswhich began a month and a half ago. The Contentious-Administrative Chamber decided this after five hearings held this morning, which served for the Madrid executive, the far-right party, and three ultra associations to launch attacks against the regularization process promoted by the Spanish government after an agreement with Podemos. In one of them, the State Attorney announced that as of May 21st, 549,596 applications had been submitted and 91,905 had begun to be processed. Those who passed the first filter received a provisional authorization to work. In many cases, these were people who had jobs: they were working illegally and now do so legally, or they have found work elsewhere. "We are not talking about entry, but about a radically different issue. We are talking about a group of people who were in Spain, who can prove five months of residence, and who had deficits in accessing rights," argued the State Attorney. He also highlighted that the regularization serves to "respond to labor market challenges" and seeks to offer "effective and rapid integration" to people who have "roots" and an "inseparable bond of coexistence" in Spain.

In broad daylight and on the city promenade, in September 2023, several young people threw tables and chairs at each other in a pitched battle that ended up being a kind of turning point in Manresa. That episode caused several residents to take to the streets to demand measures against "insecurity" in the street from the municipal government, led by the republican Marc Aloy. That demonstration, however, was already born divided, and some groups directly distanced themselves from it so as not to link insecurity with immigration. This is, in fact, the fragile balance in which Manresa, a city of 80,000 inhabitants with almost 22% of people from abroad, has been moving for some years.

Sant Blai street has historically been one of the most commercial in Tortosa and well illustrates the changes the city has undergone in recent years. In the capital of Baix Ebre live about 36,000 people, 23.5% of whom are of foreign origin. Many of the immigrants work in the fields or run small establishments in the city. This is the case of Oman, who opened a restaurant on Sant Blai street a year and a half ago, the Luxury Rif. It is flanked by a call shop, on one side, and a kebab shop, a few meters away. A neighbor enters and asks if he minds if he orders something to eat. Oman, who is in the middle of Ramadan when we do this report, says no. "We are here, working hard," he explains about the business, where traditional Moroccan food is served. Moroccans are the foreign population group with the most weight in the region: they represent 30% of foreigners, according to Idescat data.

Let's think for a moment about the work behind the Phoenix Report, published this May. Six economists of undisputed prestige —Xavier Cuadras Morató, Jordi Galí, Modest Guinjoan, Guillem López Casasnovas, Miquel Puig and Jaume Ventura, coordinated by Xavier Roig— have had to agree on more than one hundred and twenty pages of analysis, accept external arguments, renounce their own personal positions, and put their academic and social capital at stake to achieve a greater good: to awaken a country. To hold it up to the mirror. To proclaim, with data and rigor, that the emperor has no clothes. And the king is naked because while Catalonia's GDP has grown above the European average in the last 25 years, GDP per capita has fallen 12 percentage points compared to our European partners. A quarter of a century ago we were six points above the European average. Today we are six points below. We have created wealth, yes. But we have distributed it among more and more people and in a worse and worse way. This is where we need to stop and think. Because there is a deep confusion, whether interested or naive, about what distributing wealth means. The State tends to understand distribution as providing more services to those who cannot afford them. And it is true that in an advanced society collective solidarity reaches where the individual cannot reach alone. But there is no better distribution of wealth than increasing people's wages. That fewer and fewer people have to depend on public resources to have a full life. That every worker can feel responsible for their own future and have control over their life. Jarvis Cocker, from Pulp, sang it with bitter irony in "Common People": "how does it feel to live your life without no meaning or control?" It is a song about the romanticization of poverty. Today it could be the soundtrack to a growing part of Catalan society. 

In recent years, the role of immigration has been placed right at the center of the country's social debate. And, in economic terms, arguments for and against have suggested that it both enriches and impoverishes us. But, really, what are the jobs that immigrants hold in Catalonia? What type of foreigner has more weight in each sector? This year's extraordinary regulation has amplified the debate on whether demographic growth will or will not be sustainable in the long term. For now, a large part of the business community has not hesitated to position itself in favor, seeing foreign talent as the best way to fill the gaps in the Catalan labor market.

After decades dedicated to politics, the former Prime Minister of Luxembourg and then President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, delivered the best sentence of his life: "We all know what needs to be done, what we don't know is how to get re-elected once we have done it" (2007). The difference between knowing and doing, or between diagnosis and solution. And here we are, in the permanent struggle between what knowledge tells us, what the quality of public debate is capable of agreeing upon, and what is politically executed. We are talking about democratic politics, of course, which has many more limitations than autocratic regimes, which in the same way that they approve a five-year plan, make a minister disappear or make a dissident fly out of a window.

In recent months, I have been part of a team of economists who have been reflecting on the evolution of the Catalan economy and its prospects. We have focused on the concept of “highly subsidized” wages. We consider those to be wages that do not allow the worker to contribute – via taxes and social contributions – to pay even for those public services that they will directly consume throughout their lives (without including the many they will indirectly enjoy). We have calculated that this limit was, in 2023, at €27,500 gross, which in 2026 would be equivalent to €30,000.Since society has to supplement the cost of the services that these workers benefit from, it is deduced on the one hand that the employer pays them below their cost, and, on the other hand, that the final customer benefits from a hidden subsidy, since they do not pay the full cost of the service they receive.All societies that enjoy a progressive tax system and a strong welfare state have many workers who earn below the level we have defined. This is not, therefore, the issue. What has interested us is the existence of sectors that meet three conditions.The first, that not only employ “highly subsidized” workers, but that the average salary is below that level, because it is as if all their workers were. In this case we are talking about “highly subsidized” activities and we consider that society should consider whether they should exist or whether they should pay their workers so little.The second, that they be very job creators. The primary sector, for example, is an "highly subsidized" sector, but it is not creating jobs, and, moreover, it has the additional social value of combating the desertification of the territory.The third, that the ultimate beneficiary is a non-resident, because this means that the subsidy goes from taxpayers to people who are not, so that the country is impoverished through exports that, in the end, are sold below their cost.Unfortunately, a large part of Catalan growth in the last 25 years has been driven by economic activities that meet these three characteristics. This prominence explains why the enormous growth of the Catalan economy in the last 25 years – not exceptional within the Spanish framework, but yes within the European one – has not translated into higher well-being for the average Catalan, but rather, on the one hand, into migratory flows that pressure the housing market and saturate public services, and, on the other, into wage stagnation.

A harsh report on the state of the Catalan economy, prepared by several economists, criticizes the country's productive structure because several business sectors end up being, de facto, "highly subsidized" by the rest of the economic fabric. This current model has represented an "impoverishment" of Catalan society and a continuous loss of productivity of the business fabric compared to Europe in the last 25 years. "The country is bleeding out," summarized the report's coordinator, executive and engineer Xavier Roig.

When she was a child, without knowing why, she already asked to live in Catalonia. And now, at 57, she knows she will never return to her country of origin. Sandra Monge Palladino was born in 1969 in the Argentine city of Rosario, into a family originally from the Italian Piedmont. Educated in a ideologically very diverse environment, she has always been linked to anti-capitalist left-wing movements. During her childhood, she suffered the blows of the military dictatorship of General Videla (1976-1983), by which she has always remained marked.

There are many ways to divide Catalonia, but the most naive is the one that draws a line between "real Catalonia" and all invented or synecdochic Catalonias. There are people who believe they have discovered the DNA of authentic Catalanism at the Feria de Abril, organized by the powerful and doped lobby of Andalusian entities, where the rebujito and flamenco are starting to clash with the mojito and reggaeton (because, for the defenders of real Catalonia, plurality is synonymous with hispanicity and nothing more). From which it can be deduced that, if by an improbable migratory phenomenon, half a million Catalans were to move to live in Andalusia and a casteller group called Los Chiquitos de Fuengirola were formed there, a 4 of 9 with folre i manilles would be as Andalusian as the pilgrimage to El Rocío.It is as absurd to put the April Fair into the bag of Catalan culture as it would be to put the Oktoberfest and flamenco begin to stumble over the bourgeois.For this reason, the failure of the sovereignist process, with the marvellous swan song that was October 1st, constitutes a national drama: it was the occasion for Catalonia to take a step forward in a climate of democratic celebration and respect for plurality that had nothing to do with the system of punishment and repression that successive Spanish governments have imposed before and since. An independent Catalonia, or at least more sovereign, could it have managed its plurality better than it currently does? Resoundingly, yes. But the weakness of the sovereignist leaders and the inflexibility of the Spanish powers made impossible a country agreement, democratic yet plural, regarding individual and collective identities.That failure was not only of the sovereignists, but of the whole country, and also of a Spanishness(that of the real Spain?) which in the end needed the police and the judges to prevail. Now we are paying the consequences. We have public services in a mess, a situation of plunder that no one bothers to deny, and a vital but increasingly minoritized language. And above all, we have a disillusioned native element, which has lost the generosity of October 1st, and which in part has allowed itself to be seduced by the siren songs of the far-right. After the victory of batons over ballot boxes, did anyone expect anything else? It is very curious that those who most exclaim about the 'orriolista' rise are those who have made it grow, by subordinating Catalan identity to Spanish identity and beheading the democratic sovereignist parties, with a cynically conformist shrug of the shoulders –it's the market, friend–. And they will call us supremacists... How dare they!

Yeni Sánchez, 33 years old, is Honduran and has been living in Girona with her husband for three years. She has two children, a boy and a girl. In recent months, she has been living in an irregular situation after losing international protection. This week, however, she has been able to apply for the "extraordinary regulation for migrants. She has already submitted the application and, within weeks, she expects to have the provisional response to obtain residence and work permits. "It has been a horrible few months, but now I'm starting to feel calm and very hopeful," she explains.

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.

Stricter barriers to enter the country, but equal rights for people who regularize their situation. The watermelon theory, which advocates for exhaustive border controls but more inclusive rights for residents, seems to perfectly fit the opinion of the majority of Catalans. This is reflected in the ARA survey, conducted by YouGov, which is published this weekend. 66% of respondents are in favor of making the conditions for entering and settling in Catalonia (and, by default, in Spain, which has the powers in immigration) more restrictive, a percentage much higher than those who believe they should remain as they are (17%) or should be even more permissive (9%).

We offer you a survey to know what Catalans think about hot topics such as immigration, Trump and the rent cap, and also what would be the voting intention for the Parliament.

Killing children is not easy; one must know how. In abstract terms, extermination proclamations of an entire people can be made, as Netanyahu or other genocidal leaders do, but the truth is that this job –annihilating creatures– cannot be done by just anyone. Who will go door to door, when the extermination of an entire race is decreed, to finish off all the children living there? Who will be able to pull the trigger or drop a bomb, who will aim with a squinted eye directly at the head of a child who barely stands a few feet tall? Who will plunge a knife into tender flesh and endure the sharp, horrifying screams? Very few people, in fact, could carry out the worst of acts, the most fatal and terrible: ending the life of a defenseless sprout. That is why soldiers must be trained to dehumanize the other in a process that is two-way. Because it is impossible to see “the enemy” in a creature if one has not suffered a significant erosion of one’s own humanity.

When she was 6 years old, teacher Maryam El Hamidi (Tangier, 1994) experienced firsthand the ordeal her students have recently gone through. With her mother and sister, they came to live in Castelló d’Empúries to reunite with her father in the year 2000. "In the schools where I have worked, they see me as a mirror. Especially women, they see a role model. Perhaps I haven't gone through the same circumstances as them, but I know their needs. I give them confidence and motivation. If the road is long, I make it shorter," assures El Hamidi.