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.

As if the Spanish government didn't have enough open fronts with the justice system, another unexpected one has now opened in the administrative chamber of the Supreme Court against the extraordinary regularization of immigrants, which ends this very 30th and has already exceeded one million applications. The Supreme Court, responding to the appeals filed by the Valencian and Aragonese governments, both from the PP, now questions the legality of the regularization based on European regulations. This new judicial blow to the Sánchez government is signed by Carlos Lesmes, a conservative magistrate who was president of the CGPJ and the TS for 5 years; Wenceslao Olea, who was a member of the CGPJ at the proposal of the PP, and Fernando Román García, who was Secretary of State for Justice under Mariano Rajoy.

Thousands of migrants crowded around plastic bags, boxes and trash bags with the belongings they managed to salvage, and women hiding babies under blankets. This was the image of recent weeks in a camp in a South African city after anti-immigrant activists asked undocumented foreigners to leave the country before June 30. An image that contrasts with that of this Tuesday: empty streets, businesses with their shutters down, deserted transport stations and a strong police presence. This is how several South African cities woke up on a day marked by demonstrations called by the anti-immigrant group March and March and the opposition party ActionSA, who have set June 30 as the deadline for irregular immigrants to leave the country.

On the day the extraordinary regularization process for migrants in the country concludes, the Spanish government has presented its Integration and Citizenship Plan; a program financed with an initial allocation of 500 million euros annually, aiming to strengthen the inclusion of foreigners arriving in Spain. "Faced with fear, rigorous policy; faced with hatred, humanity," stated the President of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, during the presentation, thus emphasizing the initiative's benefits.

Days after the European Parliament approved the Return Regulation to the cry of "send them back!" (send them back!), in Spain the deadline for submitting applications for the extraordinary regularization process ends with figures that will exceed one million people. Faced with irregular immigration, the European Union responds with deportations - which it dreams of as massive - and celebrates it with overflowing joy. Spain, on the other hand, is carrying out the largest extraordinary regularization in its history.Why? The regularization is the result of the mobilization of migrant communities that began in the midst of the pandemic and culminated in the largest Popular Legislative Initiative (it surpassed 700,000 signatures) ever presented to the Congress of Deputies. Years later, a last-minute pact between PSOE and Podemos unblocked it. But the regularization would also not be understood without taking into account much more structural factors that have remained unchanged since the beginning of the century.The first is the almost insatiable demand for new workers which is met by the arrival of immigrant people. The demand is structural, but in periods of economic growth like the current one, it grows exponentially. The second is that there are no regular entry routes for these workers: this is why most of them enter as tourists and stay for a few years working irregularly while waiting to regularize their status. The third is that the majority are Latin Americans, who are perceived as necessary and culturally close. Although they are not the only ones, they are the desired ones.

The day before the extraordinary regularization process for migrants ends, there are still those who submit their documentation. For Al Bilal, a Pakistani man in his forties, it has been "very" difficult to obtain all the papers, especially the criminal records from their country because they had only partially reached them to the point where they had considered completing the procedures without attaching the proof they had requested. Finally, the paper arrived last week, just in time "to avoid surprises," he says. On the contrary, it even includes the registration that is not required. Pending definitive data, the latest official figures from a couple of weeks ago indicated that 900,000 applications have been made, although journalistic reports increased the figures to 1.2 million cases, more than double the half a million predicted by the Spanish government.

Lamine Yamal's boots explain better than many speeches what football is today. And, incidentally, what Europe is today.Lamine Yamal plays for Spain, but he has had the flags of Morocco and Equatorial Guinea, the countries of origin of his parents, printed on his boots. In a single gesture, identity, roots, and mobility coexist. And this mix, far from weakening teams, makes them stronger, more unpredictable, and more attractive.In this World Cup, many teams can no longer be understood as homogeneous national blocs. Nine of Spain's twenty-six players work for teams outside the country. The entire squad of Ivory Coast plays abroad. And only a quarter of Morocco's footballers were born in Morocco. France, probably the most feared team in the tournament, is also a product of this mix: only four players have parents born in the Hexagon.Individual cases make it even more evident. Lamine Yamal and Michael Olise could have chosen which country to represent. Olise plays with France, but was born in England and could also have played with Algeria or Nigeria. The two Williams brothers have chosen different paths: Nico plays with Spain; Iñaki, with Ghana. The admired – and loved and missed – Messi, with Spanish nationality and trained at La Masia, was about to play with la roja in 2004.Almost all the teams in this World Cup are mosaics of ethnic, national, and cultural intersections. And yet –or perhaps precisely because of this–, football lovers are witnessing the most interesting, fun, competitive, and beautiful championship to watch in recent decades.Can we get anything out of all this? Yes, and not just about football.The first lesson is that confrontation with the other is a powerful mechanism for creating the existential feeling that the anthropologist Victor Turner called communitas. Football matches are an example: fans forget all their internal differences, suspicions, and grudges, and gather unconditionally under a common cause.The set of individuals becomes a community. A single people. Differences –political, social, economic– disappear, absorbed by an irrational and dionysian spirit. Facing a well-defined adversary, human beings tend to merge with the masses to confront it. It is enough to define an enemy — this one or that other— for this popular force to go here or there.

In January, federal immigration agents killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti – both US citizens – in Minneapolis, during Operation Metro Surge. The deaths sparked protests across the country and the Administration ended the operation within weeks. They focused on the human cost of the recent escalation in immigration enforcement. What had not yet been measured is the cost to local economies where this surveillance has been most intense.

Immigration must be discussed, we cannot bury our heads in the sand: can ten million people fit in Catalonia? This is the star rhetorical question that has taken hold in public opinion and fuels the xenophobic discourse of the far-right. It is their main ideological fuel. The implicit conclusion: too many people are coming from outside. Of course, many of those who ask the question do not consider themselves xenophobic or far-right. But they have been caught in the web of great suspicion against newcomers, whom they blame for all our woes: the housing shortage (as if the real estate crash and tourism had not been decisive), the education crisis (as if it were not a global crisis), the strain on healthcare (it is ignored that the immigrant population is much younger and uses little healthcare), the stagnant vitality of the Catalan language (it is absurd to blame new speakers we want to attract), precarious employment (but the minimum wage has gone from €648 in 2015 to €1,221 in 2026)... Immigrants are an easy scapegoat to point at and be battered.

The Supreme Court of the United States on Thursday granted two major victories to the Trump administration in immigration cases. On the one hand, it ruled that the government can end the temporary protection status currently enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians. On the other, it decided it can physically prevent immigrants from crossing the border, even if they are asylum seekers.