The question is not "who is Catalan" administratively, which is well reflected in the Statute (which we did not vote for, but which is in force): officially, they are "Spanish citizens who have administrative residence in Catalonia". Then come the less administrative definitions. The most famous one, formulated by President Pujol: "A Catalan is anyone who lives and works in Catalonia... and wants to be". This definition (valid for me) bypasses the requirement to go to the police station and to know what is on your ID card, which, on the other hand, is the official criterion. This last criterion is sufficient, however, to make the water crystal clear: if this were the case, Mariano Rajoy would not have come out to question the Frenchness of French players or José María Aznar would not refer to "a national majority" to refer to parties like PP, PSOE or Vox (excluding the rest, who would not be "national").  The administrative definition, therefore, does not end the debate but begins it. Perhaps it is sufficient for mentalities that are in favor of maximum openness, multiculturalism, and minimal identity differentiation, for whom the paper should be enough and even obtaining it should be very easy. And I must admit that the law, in effect, is the space of greatest objectivity: if the Statute says this, this is gospel. The problem is that for many years we have not gone to mass, that God's law has many buts, and that even gravity we should talk about. Laws change, in theory, according to parliaments. And, secondly, laws do not always tell the truth and even less so the whole truth. If that were the case, Catalonia is not a nation. A concept that the immense majority of Catalans identify as true, but which, legally, is not recognized anywhere. Like Galileo's theories in his time, indeed.  

The fact that xenophobia is increasing in Catalonia is a fact, and it is a repugnant fact for those of us who venerate the concept of universal human rights.The trigger for this phenomenon is the migratory flow we have been receiving since the beginning of the century, and if we want to combat it, the first thing we must do is face an uncomfortable truth: that immigration inevitably harms some, and very specifically, members of the popular classes. Why? Because immigration puts downward pressure on wages (when employers have difficulty filling vacancies, the alternative to raising wages is to hire an immigrant), because it puts upward pressure on housing prices (does the fact that we have gone from 6 to 8 million inhabitants so rapidly and without planning have nothing to do with it?), and because it makes access to public services difficult ("if I am poor but the immigrant is poorer, they take my school lunch scholarship"). Faced with these facts, well-meaning people —on the left and on the right— tend to respond with two arguments. The first, that the phenomenon is inevitable (due to our aging, due to their lack of alternatives...); the second, that immigration is good for the economy because it increases GDP, and therefore allows us to dedicate more resources to financing public services and thus compensate those who may be adversely affected. Unfortunately, both arguments are false.

I currently attend to more than a dozen young people in my practice, some born in Morocco and others here, children of Moroccan parents. When I listen to them, I often think about how little they resemble the portrait we usually paint of the children of immigrants. They all have higher education: degrees, master's degrees, or doctorates. They hold diverse professions and occupy positions of responsibility in hospitals, universities, professional associations, and other institutions in the country. But there is a characteristic that unites them even more than their résumés.

The emergence of Aliança Catalana (AC) in Parliament and the growth predicted by demography have led Junts to move to try to stem the vote leakage that polls foresee towards Sílvia Orriols' party. And it has done so mainly on immigration matters. Although Carles Puigdemont's formation has not yet presented its immigration plan —it has been delayed without any public explanation, but it coincides with the fact that a part of the party considers that the focus should not be placed on Aliança's framework—, it has made moves both in Parliament and in Congress, as well as in municipalities. What steps has it taken?

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?

I come from a world in which the idea of nation did not exist, let alone that of state. The only collective belonging was that of the tribe and a vague notion of one's own identity based on certain differential values supposedly exclusive to our "race" (a Castilianism that meant "us"). Beyond this close dimension of parents and family, there was nothing. The Moroccan homeland has never represented us, being as it is founded on the supremacy of the Arabophones and the Frenchified elites who have always looked with contempt on the north, the savages of the Rif. As for the Moroccan state, the regime has done nothing but mistreat the region from the very moment it passed from the hands of the Spanish colonizer to the colonizer Hassan II. So that those of us who come from there have inherited nothing but silence and suspicion towards the mahzen, the vigilant and corrupt state that with its repression and abandonment led us to the diaspora. We did not emigrate, we were expelled from the place where we were born and we have taken root in the neighborhoods on the periphery of the periphery of European cities. As second-class citizens here, we live infinitely better than we would have lived in "our land". 

Let's start with the big headlines that the latest barometer of the Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió of the Generalitat, which confirms already known trends in our political landscape. Aliança Catalana positions itself as the third force – in a technical tie with the second, ERC – in the Parliament, thanks to votes that leave Junts per Catalunya, which shows unexpected weakness. Meanwhile, the PSC, despite accumulating a great deal of power, not only does not advance, but recedes. All of this coincides, for example, with the survey published by this newspaper last May, although Sílvia Orriols' rise was not as pronounced then as it is now.Before continuing, it is worth pointing out that polls are only a snapshot, the reflection of a specific moment in a reality – in this case, political reality – that is constantly evolving. Shortly after the photograph was taken, the situation has already changed and is different. In this regard, it should be remembered that we are in July 2026 and the Catalan elections will be held, if they are not brought forward, in the spring of 2028. There is a long time to go. Many things, foreseen and unforeseen, have to happen between now and then. For example, it is very possible that next year we will have a PP-Vox government in Madrid, and we also have to expect that the amnesty will have been fully effective and Carles Puigdemont will have returned to Catalonia. However, polls serve to help us understand and better grasp the situation we are in.The main protagonists today are, without a doubt, Sílvia Orriols and her party. Never before, since the recovery of democracy, has such a rapid and resounding rise been seen. Aliança is receiving support from many people who had voted for Junts. It is also taking voters from Vox. It is very clear that Orriols's main appeal is the call against immigration, especially against Muslim immigration. This fact should serve for everyone to realize that the migratory issue must be addressed, whether one likes it or not. It cannot be allowed to be taken over and capitalized on by either Aliança or Vox. The fact that these two parties have an estimated voting intention of practically 25% indicates that immigration – in the volume that Catalonia has received it – is perceived as a problem by many citizens. It is an important concern. If we do not want the dehumanizing and often impossible recipes of the far-right to continue advancing, the rest of the forces must face the phenomenon head-on, they must foster an honest debate and they must make realistic – autonomies have few competences in this matter – and sensible proposals. Hiding our heads in the sand and pretending that nothing is happening leads us to a disastrous scenario.

Registering in the municipality where one resides is a rocky road for many people who do not have a rental contract. Increasingly there are more town councils are creating obstacles for registration, a double obligation procedure for both local administration and all citizens, which in recent years has become a political weapon among mayors of all political colors. In a survey conducted by Ksnet on behalf of ECAS (the federation of Catalan social action entities) among about fifty social entities present in 60 municipalities (where 5.1 million inhabitants live), it is indicated that 40 of these populations have difficulties or incidents in this procedure. In half of them, rights are directly violated because they do not comply with the law when they do not recognize the figure of fictitious or no fixed address registration, foreseen, precisely, for residents who cannot or are not allowed to register their residence in an apartment or who live on the street. "Not wanting to register everyone who lives there is cheating yourself," summarized Pepa Fernández, a defender of the citizenry of Santa Coloma de Gramenet.

The result of the CEO survey puts numbers to a reality that we have all felt on the street, that of the growing voting intention of many people towards Aliança Catalana. What happens is that these numbers are -or would be, rather- a political tsunami and would represent a new page in the history of Catalan society.Going from the two deputies they have now to 23-25 as the CEO says is a tsunami. And for Junts, going from 35 to 13-18 is also one.When a party's main message is as basic as “Save Catalonia” and it is formulated by a leader who is not at all empathetic, at the head of an unknown team, and, even so, their electoral expectations skyrocket, it means that they have connected with the real or suggested discontents of many people, in relation to insecurity in the streets, Islamic radicalism, “massive” immigration, the emigration of well-prepared young Catalans, the decline of the language or fiscal plunder. Many Catalans feel – and what is worse, notice – that the country is slipping through their fingers. And pay attention, because the diagnosis has found a new centrality in which voters from the integrating Catalanism of Junts and Convergència to the bullfighting and Vox Legion Spanish nationalists have come to coincide. 1 out of every 3 votes that Aliança Catalana would win would come from Junts, and 1 out of every 4 votes would come from Vox, united by the flag of Islamophobia. The current parliamentary majority of PSC, Esquerra, Comuns would barely hold on, with the PSC dropping from 42 to 36-38. The government of appeasement, the one of management, is not being sufficient, among other things because the management is clearly improvable.That Aliança Catalana has detected the causes of discontent does not mean it has the capacity to remedy them. In fact, far-right parties are specialists in identifying culprits, but they are not as effective when it comes to finding solutions; on the contrary, because there can be a very short step from harshness to hatred that breaks societies. And with hatred, we are heading towards a new social fracture. Look at the report by Sebastián Marín, about how about 400 people of Moroccan origin gathered last night in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat to follow France-Morocco in the World Cup, in a meeting organized by the Moroccan consulate in Barcelona. Let's take it as a phenomenon: we cannot confuse the effects of radical Islamism, or the crime associated with the poverty of some immigrants, with living alongside neighbors of the Islamic faith. And the far-right, as we know, mixes everything up.The CEO's survey implicates Junts and within Junts, President Puigdemont. He should have been able to live in Catalonia for months now, under the amnesty law, but the judiciary has blocked it. This harms the expectations of a party that heavily relies on the almost iconic figure of the president in exile. At the same time, it is evident that we have gone from a Puigdemont with political initiative, who moved around Europe and overcame arrests and was very present in the media to direct the message, to a Puigdemont who basically only speaks on social media, with an often resentful tone, marked by the almost nine years of exile, the poor results of the negotiation with the PSOE, which conveys the idea that he doesn't care about the PP or the PSOE, because for Catalonia's purposes they are the same. Puigdemont had the status of a political rock star. Today, Aliança Catalana is acting as a substitute for the interest in politics, for the emotional vote, that the Process represented. And Junts will not be able to address it effectively if it does not stop being a party angry with the world (for whatever reason it may have) and begins to generate confidence and pride among the people.

The Supreme Court will not take the regularization of immigrants to the European justice system. As the high court has explained, it will not raise a preliminary ruling to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on the decree approved by the Spanish government to regularize the situation of 1.2 million immigrants. Along the same lines, the third chamber of the Supreme Court also dismisses applying the precautionary measure requested by the governments of the Generalitat Valenciana and Aragon, which involved suspending the regularization until the European justice system ruled. In summary, the Supreme Court will continue to study the appeals without resorting to the European justice system.

First, the data. Back in the 17th century, one in five Catalans had been born in Occitania and other parts of France. That's a long time ago, agreed. Let's jump ahead: in 1930, the same was true for 27% of the population. And at the end of the 20th century, only 25% of people had all four grandparents born in Catalonia. In recent years, especially since the failure of the independence process and coinciding with the global wave of the far-right, exclusionary discourses have taken hold. The old guard of Catalan politics, especially former president Pujol, but not only him – also the heirs of PSUC and PSC, or Pujol's own historical rival, Raimon Obiols–, continue to defend welcoming and inclusion, but who listens to them?

The scapegoat is the one who pays for the faults of others: the expression originates from the ritual sacrifice of a goat (kid or billy goat) to atone for the sins of the people of Israel, as narrated in the book of Leviticus. A solemn barrabasada (in this case, the expression comes from the villain of Christianity, Barabbas). Today we continue to practice goat sacrifices, but metaphorical sacrifices, bloodless, of a mouth or a tweet. They work quite well as a mechanism for us to vent.

Sometimes, and especially from some political positions, the incorporation of immigrants into the labor market is presented as a zero-sum game. This means, according to game theory, that what some gain, others lose, and vice versa. From the most radical positions, newcomers are labeled as a threat to natives in the labor and social sphere. If many arrive, they take jobs at the expense of the native-born population, they claim. And they are also identified as greater beneficiaries of public benefits than contributors and payers.

Immigrant population contributed approximately 1.7 percentage points to the average annual growth of Spanish GDP (3.7%) and 0.5 points to the average annual growth of GDP per capita between 2022 and 2025, according to Pilar Cuadrado Salinas, a specialist in quantitative analysis and economic information management at the Bank of Spain, who highlighted that Spain is currently the country that contributes most to the demographic growth of the European Union thanks to immigration.

The extraordinary regularization process for migrants has concluded with 1,174,978 applications to join the process throughout the State. The figure exceeds the half-million forecast made by Pedro Sánchez's executive when it announced the opening of the procedure, the seventh of its kind in democratic times and the first in 20 years. Of the total requests, more than 52% have already been admitted for processing, and therefore the beneficiaries now have a first temporary authorization to live and work in Spain. After admission, the government has three months to respond, but rejected applications have not been made public. Catalonia, with 257,000 —two out of every 10—, is the territory that has registered the most files, ahead of the Community of Madrid (202,000), the Valencian Country (167,000), and Andalusia (161,000).

Julia Aceituno first set foot in Girona in 1990. She had grown up in Talanga, a small town of 40,000 inhabitants an hour from the capital of Honduras, Tegucigalpa, and at the time she was 36 years old and had three children. "I came for a holiday during the time of Felipe González," she recalls. At that time in Girona there were only nine of her compatriots: "We all knew each other!". Thirty-six years later, in the urban area of Girona alone, it is estimated that there are about 20,000 people of Honduran origin, and in the entire province, 40,000.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo has decided that if the democratic game doesn't favor him enough, the rules must be changed. If he doesn't win, the problem is the system, not him. And some of the citizens who have the right to vote recognized. He fiddlesby crossing the dangerous red line of instilling distrust and suspicion in the guarantees of the process itself. If the difficulties many residents abroad face in getting their vote from where they live are well known, now the leader of the Popular Party intends to put obstacles in the way of a specific type of Spaniards living outside state territory: the grandchildren and descendants of exiles and emigrants who were forced to leave the country, let's say, due to force majeure. Feijóo hasn't even ruffled his hair questioning the validity of a law that aims to repair in the present the consequences of the fierce repression of the war and the dictatorship. Both he and part of the PP and, of course, Vox, seem to want to continue humiliating the victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship ninety years after the "alzamiento" (which was not national at all, "national" was the Republic). As if the executions, prison, and exile of all those who committed no greater crime than defending themselves from fascism were not enough, as if the violence of the past were not enough, now it seems they want to continue perpetuating it in the present. If Franco wanted to exterminate all the elements he considered impure and subversive, and turned Spaniards who were not as he believed they should be into enemies, now the aim is to eliminate the vestiges, memories, and narrative of those who come directly from the horror and are the fruit of the barbarism that began that July of '36. Later they will say that it is the left that digs up the Civil War dead and they will complain about being considered heirs of the dictatorship, but when they attack the losers they show whose sons and grandsons they are. 

That the Supreme Court now allows itself to question the regularization of immigrants carried out by the current government of Spain (the deadline to apply for it ended this Tuesday) tells us several things. The main one, that the high court, with a majority of magistrates from the PP and Vox, is not only well decided to continue the fight for the salvation of Spain through the persecution of left-wing corrupt individuals, or suspects, or those pointed out (“they must have done something”), but has also decided to challenge the policies of a democratically elected government. This is nothing new, but rather —we said yesterday— we have known this at least since the Constitutional Court's ruling against the Statute of Catalonia. Now, however, with Catalan independence movement undone, scattered and poisoned with discourses of hatred and supremacism/racism (defeated, therefore), they no longer need to deal with what the magistrates would call “territorial issues”. Instead, they now prefer to intervene in immigration policy: at every moment, their debate.The Supreme Court's “doubts” regarding the immigrant regularization process are raised by the requests submitted by two autonomous communities, Aragon and the Valencian Community, governed by the PP and Vox, or by the PP with the support of Vox. These are communities with rulers who maintain — they also say this in the Balearic Islands, for example — that the regularization of immigrants will cause employment and housing problems for Spaniards. It seems that mass tourism and uncontrolled speculation do not cause these kinds of problems; on the other hand, giving legal recognition to people who already live here — subjected to labor exploitation and immersed in the underground economy — does cause problems. Or perhaps it is that these parties have also realized that anti-immigration, hate, and racism/supremacism discourses indeed have a great following nowadays and they stubbornly embrace them. And with the legal certainty of the Supreme Court, which gladly accompanies them on this journey.To do so, the Supreme Court looks, and this is new, towards Europe. Traditionally, Spanish justice distrusts and speaks ill of European courts, and has blamed, insulted, and ridiculed them every time they have ruled in favor of separatists or exiled rappers. Now, however, they seek complicity and shelter under the protection of the EU's Migration and Asylum Pact, which came into force on June 12 and is one of the most shameful documents the Union has produced in its entire history. It can be attempted to justify with whatever subterfuges one wishes, but it is the EU giving itself the green light to create detention camps where immigrants will be abandoned to an uncertain and often fatal fate; yes: in non-EU countries, so that it is not seen so much. The Supreme Court uses this to deepen the drift of the Spanish state, according to which the courts take the reins of government as and when they see fit. The Migration and Asylum Pact (the name is already a sarcasm) is, for its part, a giant step for the EU towards its self-destruction.

Yesterday, the extraordinary regularization process for immigrants opened by the Spanish socialist government ended, and all forecasts have been exceeded: one million two hundred thousand requests have been submitted. If we do a rule of three with the initial forecasts, around 300,000 applications from people who already live here without papers may have been submitted in Catalonia.For Pedro Sánchez, the overflow of the figure shows that the idea was good, because it was necessary. But the Supreme Court has opened the door to taking this regularization of immigrants to European justice so that it clarifies whether European law is respected, as the processing of more than one million applications could not comply with the European migratory pact. The Supreme Court has gotten involved because the Valencian and Aragonese governments, both from the PP, have asked it to. But, as I was saying, yesterday Sánchez puffed out his chest and at an event to present an integration plan he said that without immigrants Spain would lose 19% of its wealth creation in the next 25 years. The slogan of the plan caught my attention: “Where do they come from? They come from building the country”. A slogan that emphasizes the most economic aspect of immigration. Without immigration there are no caregivers, or bricklayers, or bus drivers… and they are essential because they are jobs that keep the country running every day. But building a country is something more. It has to do with rights and duties, and in our case, with integration into a culture and a language that do not have the maximum protection of the State (in fact, they rather have the maximum aggression from some parties and State bodies). And here is where the slogan of making country, so Pujol-like, is a mockery. I read in the chronicle of ARA: “Regarding Catalan, sources from the Sánchez government indicate that knowledge of the language will not have special value”. It is devastating. And at the same time, it is not new; it is coherent with the state in which we live, where only Spanish is mandatory. The lack of ambition of the Illa government on this issue, with the interested appeasement of business sectors, is regrettable. Much effort to fight the battle (or so they said) so that Catalan can be spoken in the European Parliament, but no step to do something as normal as requiring people who come to a country to know the language. It is a harm to the language and to coexistence. And without the Catalan language, immigrants cannot build a nation in Catalonia. Immigration is used to instill fear and win elections with messages of hate. Look at what is happening in South Africa, with demonstrations against immigrants, blaming them for unemployment, crime, and the deterioration of public services. Sánchez, in the role of going it alone against the world on immigration, gives speeches of the type “in the face of hate, humanity,” but with humanitarian appeals we already know that we will not stop the hate speeches of the far-right. And demonstrating political leadership in immigration in Catalonia means that Catalan should be for everyone, especially for the newest Catalans.Good morning.

The final stretch of the extraordinary regularization process for migrants promoted by the Spanish government is coming to an end with an open judicial front. Given the doubts raised by the Supreme Court about the measure's compatibility with European law, experts consulted by ARA agree that it is unlikely to have immediate effects on the applications submitted. While the legal world points to possible shortcomings in the processing, organizations and groups that have helped migrants with paperwork – often fighting against misinformation and lack of resources and suffering from administrative collapse– are now focusing all their efforts on ensuring that applicants can complete the procedures before the deadline expires this Tuesday.