Everything was fine. The food. The treatment. The attention. The services. Until the tourists left at the beginning of autumn. "From one day to the next, we went from being good families to bad families," explains a Syrian woman who is part of a large group of asylum seekers residing in Malgrat de Mar and who denounce the feeling of "abandonment" they have experienced since October. They claim to have found cockroaches in the food, to have been given flowery and expired food, to have had fleas in the rooms, for the heating not to have worked for months on one of the floors of the hotel where they are staying, for the hot water to have constant problems, and for being denied money to buy clothes or transportation tickets that they are entitled to.

US President Donald Trump on Thursday ordered a reduction in refugee admissions to just 7,500 per year, the lowest number since the program began in 1980. He also prioritized one specific nationality: refugee status will be granted "primarily" to South Africans, described as "white South Africans" who are "illegal" in their countries of origin, according to a document released Thursday night by the White House. Former President Joe Biden also limited the number of refugees, but the cap was 125,000, and Trump himself set a maximum threshold of 15,000 during his previous term, making this 7,500 the lowest limit to date. When he took office on January 20, Trump halted most refugee admissions to the country through an executive order arguing that the program was "detrimental" to the nation's interests. The few exceptions he has made to this restriction have been the Afrikaners (South Africans descended from Dutch settlers), who have been admitted to the United States, even transferred to the country as a group from South Africa after Trump falsely claimed that They are being victims of a "genocide"These controversies Trump's statements strained relations between the African country and the Washington government, after the South African executive approved a land expropriation law at the end of January.

By 2050, up to 1.2 billion people could be forced to flee their homes due to the climate crisis, according to a report by the think tank Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) cited by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), although it points out that the "most widely cited" estimate is 200 million.The UN has long warned that climate migrations Migration is one of the great challenges of the 21st century, which has so far generated debate but few facts. Most are displacements within the borders of the same country, but more and more people are forced to migrate due to droughts, floods, hurricanes or simply because of the loss of their livelihood due to rising temperatures or rising sea levels. "Migrations could be managed if there were a rational migration policy, but the current one is based on racist and xenophobic prejudices," says Miguel Pajares, president of the Migration Policy Group. Honorary Member of the Catalan Commission for Aid to Refugees (CCAR).

An emergency fast lane to guarantee rights and protection for minors arriving in Catalonia fleeing the war in Ukraine. This is the emergency device that the Department of Social Rights has set up for the reception of children arriving to stay with host families without their legal guardians. The conflict in Ukraine has caused, on the one hand, a new migratory wave in Europe and, on the other hand, has brought to the surface the willingness of many families to take them in. "We are a country of solidarity and this fills us with pride, but we also have to be aware that we have to do the job well because the most important thing is to guarantee children's rights," said minister Violant Cervera during an event in Terrassa, where a local charity has brought a hundred minors who already regularly took part in foster programmes with Catalan families.

First the pandemic and now the crisis in Ukraine. The third sector in Europe is being forced to rethink – and digitise – by leaps and bounds in order to serve all those in need. And Alfonso Lara Montero has even been asked to explain this at the Mobile World Congress (MWC). He is the director of the European Social Network, a European network that brings together the managers of the main third sector organisations in the continent. He arrived in Barcelona thanks to m4Social, organised by the Catalonia's Committee for the Third Sector, and talks to ARA as the big question of how to take care of the refugees from the war in Ukraine takes hold in the public debate.

It is worrying how we come to normalize the pain of others, how we become thick-skinned, how we assume our comfortable impotence. According to the NGO led by activist Helena Maleno, Caminando Fronteras, this year that we have left behind us we also left behind the lives of 4,400 people who tried to enter Europe through the Spanish borders. Twelve lives cut short every day. Lives of human beings who were only looking for an opportunity far from the misery of their homeland and who, in the final stretch, embarked on a precarious boat, drowned in most cases without receiving help and often in anonymity. We have become accustomed to this terrifying humanitarian drama as if we could do nothing about it, as if it were alien to us, as if it were a distant fatalism. And none of the three things is true: Europe does nothing because it does not consider it a priority or, even worse, it acts politically with hypocrisy and cynicism; no human life should be alien to us, especially not those of people (including 205 small children) who are defenceless and bear great suffering, and accepting that these things simply happen and that the world is like this only causes them to happen more often.

They were the first people invited to visit the Catalan Parliament, two weeks ago now, when its measures against the coronavirus were lifted, and the House paid them an overwhelming tribute with all MPs giving them a standing ovation that gave them goosebumps, as they admit. Feridoon Aryan and his wife, Nooria, arrived in Barcelona on 13 October with their two children, Heraab and Anosh, aged 7 and 2. They are one of the few Afghan families who have been lucky enough to land in Spain in October onboard one of the two evacuation flights the Ministry of Defence made from Islamabad. They feel eternally grateful that they have been brought here and their lives have been saved, but they admit that they would also like to feel "human"; something they have not achieved so far. They say this quietly, not wanting to cause offence. "We know we can't complain, we know we have to put up with whatever."

Lo Javad, Fatemah and her son Amir have been a week since they arrived in Olot after being evacuated from Afghanistan. Mònica Bernabé talks to the family and explains how was the journey to leave Afghanistan. El Javad is a physiotherapist and has worked for many years as a translator for Spanish journalists. He and his family belong to the Hazara ethnic group, to which the Taliban have so much animosity because they are Shiite Muslims. The Taliban are Sunni. El Javad is convinced that if he had stayed in Afghanistan, his life would have been in danger. His wife, Fatemah, is a doctor and still doesn't know if she will be able to work in Catalonia, she is two months pregnant and just when she is due to give birth they will stop receiving aid from the Spanish government. Her goal is to find work and be able to live in freedom

At half past seven in the evening the last plane with Afghan refugees evacuated by Spain landed at the air base in Torrejón de Ardoz (Madrid). They are the last ones and they leave a landscape of despair and destruction after the attacks that Thursday left about two hundred dead and the uncertainty of what will happen now with the Taliban government. Most European countries have also completed the evacuation of their Afghan personnel and collaborators, while the United States will meet the deadline of 31 August to finish moving all its military equipment and troops that are still deployed.

With the drama in Afghanistan, the refugees issue has returned to the headlines. And perhaps it is time to remember that, with their gradual arrival, and in a changing context, the member states of the European Union have been applying integration policies with unequal results in which one can see a large gap between what the law says and what is applied afterwards. This is, in fact, the main conclusion of the latest NIEM (National Integration Evaluation Mechanism) report, a European project developed by think tanks in several countries that evaluates integration systems for refugees. Despite the fact that the 14 EU countries analysed have legal frameworks comparable to international standards in terms of the protection of migrants and refugees' rights, administrative barriers and the lack of resources, coordination and actions tailored to the needs of this group make it impossible for them to exercise the rights recognised by law. The gap between the legal framework and integration policies is especially marked in key areas such as housing. The Spanish and Greek cases are paradigmatic in this sense. Let's take a look at it.

Once the reality of the Taliban's accession to power has been accepted, the main concern of Western countries now seems to be to avoid a new wave of refugees like the one in 2015 as a consequence of the Syrian war. We recall that that episode ended, in the case of the EU, with a pact with Erdogan's Turkey to block their path in exchange for large sums of money. Now, after a disastrous and badly planned withdrawal, added to the collapse of government structures sponsored by the United States and NATO for the last 20 years, the Afghan population that does not agree with the theses of the fundamentalists is very scared, women most of all.

Ocean Viking, the rescue ship of the French NGO SOS Mediterranée, began to disembark 572 people, including 183 minors, survivors of the daily drama in the Mediterranean, now far from the media spotlight, at midday in Sicily. They were rescued in six boats in the waters separating Libya from Malta, most of them in the rescue zone under the responsibility of the European island, and after a week at sea they will be able to disembark in Italy. The largest was a fishing boat carrying 369 people. Last Saturday another dinghy boat sank off Tunisia, leaving at least 43 dead and 83 survivors. On Spain's southern border, more than 2,000 people have died this semester, as announced this week by the NGO Caminando Fronteras. They are only the first steps of a summer that will again fill the waters of the Mediterranean, the most unequal border on the planet, with deaths.

The restrictions on mobility during the coronavirus pandemic made it even more difficult for asylum seekers to reach European territory. This is described in the latest report by the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) which notes that in 2020 asylum applications fell by 32% across Europe compared to the previous year. Overall, almost 6 out of 10 of these applications were refused but, proportionally, the refusals were fewer than the previous year. Only six countries increased the number of rejected requests and among these, Spain stands out in particular: despite receiving 25% fewer applications, it denied 276% more than in 2019.

Often, journalists try to give a voice to those who don't have one, but a team of Syrian refugees in Madrid has decided to go one step further: to write a digital magazine to speak on their behalf. This is the story behind information outlet Baynana, which in Arabic means "among us". "'Us' is all of us, there is no 'them' or 'the others'," they explain.

Two weeks ago he said the opposite, but he has finally backed down. Joe Biden announced early this morning that he will raise to 62,500 people the admission cap for refugees in the United States, after criticism rained down on him for having said he would keep the cap at 15,000, the historic minimum that Donald Trump had set. It was one of his campaign promises and, in the wake of the earthquake within and outside the ranks of the Democratic Party, and the accusation that he was betraying the migrants who helped him win the election, Biden has ended up taking back the pledge, even though he has watered it down.

The crews of the Tunisian-flagged fishing boats watched the spectacle with curiosity and fascination. A speedboat with three people on board approached the barge and began handing out safety vests and face masks before radioing to the Open Arms, which immediately set a course for the location to facilitate the rescue. After reassuring the passengers, who were shouting to make themselves heard among the waves, they waited for the NGO boat to approach to proceed to embark them, carefully and one by one, first in the boats and then on the deck of the ship, where a dozen sailors and volunteers equipped with PPE identified them, assigned them a number and gave them water, food and a blanket. And so, three times in three days, three operations that saved 219 people from probable shipwreck, overshadowed by dozens of warnings of boats in distress that were not so lucky because they were never found or because the Libyan coastguard moved forward to return their crew members to their point of departure.

We all have the feeling that there are now more natural disasters than before. Sometimes we might think that these are subjective perceptions that do not correspond to reality but simply to the fact that more media attention is given to them. But in this case the reality is that in fact there are more extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, floods or droughts. Specifically 30% more since 1990. And this has consequences on human populations. According to data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDCM), every year an average of 22.7 million people around the world flee their homes as a result of disasters linked to the climate crisis.