I know how to behave. Let's say, for example, that I go to the National Theatre of Catalonia. I know the tacitly choreographed protocol and I can follow it to the letter. I know which version of myself is welcome, which fits in and doesn't cause discomfort, I know which identity to perform to be read: a little dark but without overdoing it, a little flashy but without overdoing it, I have to be that note that gives a certain twist, a very slight one, to the general score. Everything else remains out of focus. No one has explicitly asked me, but I have understood that otherness has no place here.I have lived in this country for 22 years, I have level C in Catalan, almost one hundred percent of my affective network is Catalan, I have a Catalan son... but I am still perceived as a migrant person. They continue to speak to me in Spanish and congratulate me on my "nice" accent. But it's okay, I can manage that. The complex part comes on the professional level: my place, perennial, seems to be the margin. This place where the system places me does not come from personal exclusions perpetrated by individual agents, but is the structure. And, let it be said here, mea culpa, it is also an ambiguity that is not accidental, but a survival strategy.Somehow, this "being where I can be read" that I sometimes perform is what W.E.B. Du Bois defined as double consciousness. Migrant people always look at ourselves through the eyes of others, who, as a reading mass of acceptable alterities, are the ones who measure the value of our presence. We are looked at under a catalog of options ranging from curiosity to condescension. The splitting is, without a doubt, exhausting: it is me but it is also the version that the viewer needs to feel diverse without feeling questioned. I interpret my own identity.

A butterfly that travels from Canada to Mexico to hibernate and reproduce, a whale that holds its species' record with 22,500 kilometers of travel across the oceans, or the arctic tern, a bird that -attention, spoiler- holds the longest migration in the animal kingdom. Now that spring is beginning and with it many species are on the move, we explain the main migratory routes of planetary fauna. The highways of wildlife.

Emigrating is always a difficult experience, but it becomes even more complicated if you don't know anyone in the country you're going to, if the language and customs are different, and if you're only fifteen years old, the journey is in a small boat, and you can't swim. But that's not all: when you arrive at your destination, you discover that nothing was as easy as it seemed and that paying back the money you borrowed for the journey will be nearly impossible.

Two questions to frame the debate. Does progressive sovereignty avoid discussing the management of migration flows and their impact on social cohesion, housing availability, or the marginalization of Catalan? Or, on the contrary, does conservative nationalism—intentionally or not—join in the criminalization of foreigners? Parties like Aliança Catalana and Vox are rising in the polls with an exclusionary discourse that prioritizes Catalans or Spaniards and often criminalizes immigrants. They also benefit from powerful platforms like Trumpism and its extensive media coverage. This growth has repercussions in neighboring territories.

For years, Sweden earned a reputation as one of the world's most generous countries to refugees. First came the Chileans fleeing Augusto Pinochet's regime; then the refugees from the Balkan wars; and ten years ago, the Syrians escaping the civil war and Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship. In 2015, the Scandinavian country received some 163,000 asylum seekers; only Germany took in more. Now, this open-door policy has been completely abandoned, especially since the current conservative government came to power in 2022. with the necessary crutch of the far-right party Sweden Democrats.

The a hard line against immigration The policy that the Danish government has been promoting in recent years has suffered a significant setback from the European courts, now that other European countries, with the United Kingdom at the forefront, intend to emulate the Danish migration model.

The Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) have arrested a 42-year-old woman in Barcelona, allegedly linked to an organization that charged migrant children up to €10,000 to help them reach Northern Europe. Investigators concluded that this criminal group followed a "perfectly organized" method of charging minors for travel from Somalia to Nordic countries, accompanied by an adult who provided them with passports, mobile phones, and bank cards. The officers confirmed that the woman had entered and left Somalia numerous times using different identities, and in April, police had already investigated her for similar incidents at Girona Airport. In that case, the woman arrived at Barcelona Airport with two minors on November 19. The following day, the Mossos received a tip about her location and went to the hotel where she was staying in the Sant Martí district, as there was an outstanding warrant from the National Police to identify her. The same report stated that the woman already had a record for similar cases involving other minors. The Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) took both the woman and the two minors to the police station and, once there, verified that the passports the children were traveling with were genuine, but not their own. They were using the documents of another person, with similar physical features to avoid raising suspicion, and with nationalities from Schengen Area countries to evade cross-border security controls at airports. Under the protection of the Generalitat (Catalan government).

This organization, dedicated to transporting migrant children, also provided the victims with a mobile phone so they could stay in contact with their families during the journey. In the case that led to the arrest in Barcelona, ​​once the children arrived in Spain, the first person they had contact with disappeared. From that moment on, the woman who was ultimately arrested took charge of accompanying the children and providing them with accommodation until their flight to their final destination. The two children who were with the arrested woman at the time of her arrest have been transferred to the Directorate General for the Prevention and Protection of Children and Adolescents (DGPPIA) so they can go to a protection center. The woman is accused of a crime against the rights of foreign citizens for economic reasons and by taking advantage of the victims' vulnerability.

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In 2023, Tunisia became a headache for European politicians, especially for the far-right Italian government of Giorgia Meloni. That year, some 140,000 people set sail from Tunisian beaches for Europe, and 70% were able to reach it. The figures contrasted with those of its neighbor, Algeria. With a population almost four times larger, just over 2,200 people left in 2023. Two years later, the tables have turned on the so-called central Mediterranean route: Tunisia has almost completely sealed its beaches, while in Algeria the departure of small boats has skyrocketed.

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Tragedy on the migratory route. Mauritanian authorities have recovered some seventy bodies after the sinking of a boat carrying more than one hundred migrants to the Canary Islands. The vessel sank this Thursday in the Me haijratt area, about 60 kilometers north of Nouakchott, and was carrying mostly migrants from Zambia and Senegal.

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Grandma Dolors opens the door to her street-level apartment in Mataró. Then, from the adjacent apartment, Bintou Jarju and her children, Arlet and Sam, ages 12 and 10 respectively, appear, looking as if they've gone to bed late. It's Santa Fe, and the city is celebrating. Sam is in the band Diablos, and Arlet enjoys the concerts more, I'm told. During the photo shoot for our report, diverse physical features compose the images: Dolors is rather short and pale, while her daughter Bintou and the children—who are Catalan-Negalesan—have dark skin and are on the tall side. How is it that even now so many prejudices are placed on such naturalized differences in this family?

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Migratory routes to Europe are being reconfigured, and the arrival of small boats has intensified in the Balearic Islands. This phenomenon is not new: it is known as the "balloon effect," meaning that when pressure is placed on a migratory route, the flow of people is not reduced but redirected. The latest report from the Ministry of the Interior confirms that irregular arrivals to Spain have fallen by almost 30% compared to last year, with 22,000 migrants this year, approximately 9,100 fewer. However, while the Canary Islands, historically the epicenter of the migration crisis, have experienced a 46.7% drop, the Balearic Islands have registered a 77% increase.

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If the situation doesn't change, Nadira's family [a fictitious name, like the rest of the witnesses] will soon have spent a year in the Sant Màrius private shelter, referred by social services. Nadira will find the strength to leave him, to make him her ex. in tourist establishments, some three thousand vulnerable people Like them, 41% are single-parent families, with 92% of them being women as the adult representatives.

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At the end of the three days of the Emmanuel Macron's state visit to the United Kingdom, the French President and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer have once again appeared at a joint press conference as guarantors of European firmness in supporting Ukraine in the face of Vladimir Putin's aggression. Beyond the cooperation on migration, economic, scientific and cultural matters on which a bilateral relationship is based on which is greatly strengthened after this week, Both leaders emphasized that defense and unwavering support for Ukraine are crucial in "the dangerous times we live in," according to Starmer.

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British pomp and the magnitude French troops have met this Tuesday in Windsor. With 41 salutes and The Marseillaise, King Charles III and Queen Camilla received shortly after midday the President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, and his wife, Brigitte Macron, in the first state visit of a French leader since 2008 and also the first of a head of state of the European Union since BrexitA ride in an open-air carriage—Macron and the King in one, and the Queen and Brigitte Macron in another, followed by a third with Prince William and Kate Middleton—through the streets of a fairy-tale village filled with people who didn't hesitate to come out to see the spectacle, was the first of three days of intense diplomatic and political events, which will culminate on Thursday with a summit with Prime Minister Keir.

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The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday authorized the Trump administration to suspend a temporary permit program launched during the Biden era that allowed 532,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to live and work temporarily in the United States. This is the second time this month that the high court has sided with Trump's attempts to revoke temporary legal protections for immigrants. The Supreme Court previously opened the door to ending another program that granted work permits to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans.

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It's not nostalgia, I promise, but the general blackout the other day took me back to the lost time of early childhood, before the age of 8. There's a precise boundary marked in the biography of any emigrant, the point at which the move occurs and all memory is organized around it, between the EA, before the emigration, and what came after. When, as in our case, what we leave behind is a traditional, rural society, the contrast between the two realities turns this point into a fault line. I feel like I can travel back in time because talking about life before the age of eight is talking about a pre-industrial, pre-capitalist, pre-black society, in fact. Vicente Pasqual, a history teacher with extraordinary expository skills, passionate about the subject he was teaching, tried to make us understand the importance of fallow land, and I could remember that at home they did this very thing, even though I didn't know how to say it, of letting the land fallow in my family's language. That whole world, in fact, existed in Amazic, the language of AE, and I struggled, when I tried to translate it into written form, to find the correspondences for each thing. Even now, I'm sold words for utensils or elements of that peasant life that I don't know exactly what they're called in either Catalan or Spanish. That whole universe remained encapsulated within itself, articulated by a language that its speakers have stopped using in a society that has no need for it at all. It's a way of seeing exactly how great changes occur, how we evolve with the transformations brought about by different economic systems. In other words, if someone was born in a rural environment and settles in Europe, it's practically impossible for them not to adapt to it.

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Migrant workers are gaining ground in high-value-added sectors, specifically in scientific and technical professional activities, as well as in those related to information and communication. In the former case, Social Security recorded a 7.8% increase in foreign workers across the country this March compared to March 2024, while in the latter case, the increase is 6.3%, as announced this Wednesday by the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration.

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A group of 40 migrants denied asylum by Italy arrived in Albania this Friday, where they will be held pending repatriation to their countries of origin, according to local press reports. This is the fourth attempt by Giorgia Meloni's government. after the courts overturned the previous transfersThe migrants have disembarked at the port of Shëngjin and will be transferred to the Gjadër center, one of the detention facilities built by Italy in the Balkan country as part of a controversial agreement between Rome and Tirana designed to outsource the reception of migrants rescued in the Mediterranean, with the idea that not even...

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The European Union's tendency to outsource complex social problems to third countries has continued to grow in recent years. While The agreement between Italy and Albania to detain migrants awaiting asylum in detention centers While Denmark was attracting international attention, another pact between Denmark and Kosovo went more quietly.

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In the end, all the women recognize themselves in each other's stories. "We're so alike, things haven't happened to us that differently!" they repeat. There are about twenty of them, and they have in common that they had to leave their homeland to emigrate to Catalonia and have settled in Can Padró, a neighborhood in Cornellà de Llobregat accustomed to welcoming migrants. Like those who arrived in their 60s from Extremadura or Andalusia and those, starting in this new century, from Latin America. Today this heterogeneous group—by origin and also by generation—has met in a room of the neighborhood association in an activity organized by Cáritas to promote, precisely, knowledge and interaction among neighbors who surely wouldn't meet up if it weren't for spaces like this.

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