We have a country with eight and a half million inhabitants and public services that barely covered the needs of six million Catalans forty years ago. With a birth rate among the native population that is not even enough to maintain the population, the analysis is clear: without foreigners we would be better off. Therefore, let's kick them out. This way, healthcare, education, public transport, social aid, and, in short, the well-being of the true Catalans will be at the level we deserve (and that one day, which we no longer remember, we had). Without immigrants, moreover, we will go out for a walk in our streets calmly, without fear that a gang of Latinos, Arabs, or sub-Saharans will take our lives.A purified Catalonia would certainly be more prosperous. Sooner or later we will need new Catalans; Catalans from here, Catalans named Puig, Vergés, Ferré or Giró, so perhaps we will have to review the laws we have regarding homosexual people, because whether we like it or not, nothing comes out of the relationships between them that makes the country grow. God forbid I tell people what they should do in the privacy of their own homes, but a responsible policy must look after demographic issues. And a prosperous country cannot afford for people not to have children. Therefore, if we love the country, perhaps we will have to kick out the gays, the lesbians, and the transsexuals, who do not want to make it prosper by bringing new generations of Catalans into the world. While this does not happen, however, we could rethink the role of the elderly. It is not fair that the average pension of an older person in Catalonia is higher than the minimum wage of a worker. Something is not working if it is this worker who has to pay for the pension of the older person. Taking into account how life expectancy has lengthened, and the excessive consumption that the elderly make of public healthcare, it is a country requirement to cut their benefits and direct these resources to the productive youth. We are already late to dismantle a pension regime based on plunder, because it is unfair—and ineffective—in plain sight. We must promote that every Catalan saves what they can to take charge, when the moment arrives, of the needs they may have.In short, a more dynamic and fairer Catalonia cannot afford for one-fifth of the population to live off the rest. In Catalonia, we do not want old people!

I am reading these days, a little astonished, formal declarations and positions from the left, including from political leaders of the current direction of ERC, regarding the issue of immigration present in our country and the presumed risks and problems that arise from it. Let me say, from the outset, that I do not share the attitude that can be discerned nor the concreteness of the argumentation that is clearly presented.

Is the president of the PP, Alejandro Fernández, as Catalan as the president of Junts, Carles Puigdemont? What about the Catalan identity of Juana Dolores? Is it more or less authentic than Empar Moliner's? In a memorable definition, Jordi Pujol said: a Catalan is someone who lives and works in Catalonia, and wants to be. It is an inclusive definition, certainly, but today it does not withstand even a superficial analysis: is an eighth-generation Catalan who, for whatever reason, does not feel it, still Catalan? Is a Senegalese person, also of the eighth generation, who has been living in Tarragona for ten years and feels more Catalan than Pau Casals... really Catalan? Has one of my daughters, who has been living and working in Seattle for a few years, stopped being Catalan? Are the other two, who are still here, perhaps a little more so? Of them, which one is more Catalan, the one who works or the one who doesn't?Who can tell me what it means to be Catalan?In a ranking of Catalan identity, who would win? The teenage son of a couple from Lleida born and raised in Amsterdam, because both parents work in the Netherlands, but who speaks perfect Catalan with his parents, or the boy born and raised in Mataró, son of a Moroccan-Guinean couple, who only speaks Spanish with his mother? Is the deputy Najat, born in Morocco, Muslim, mother of three children, who covers her head with a veil and is a training technician at the Masnou Town Hall, less Catalan than Sílvia, Catholic, who goes through life with her head uncovered, born in Vic, mother of five children and a library science graduate?Did those immigrants who, last century, came from Extremadura, Andalusia, Aragon, or Galicia, arrive here to disrupt the country, to make it worse? And the Catalans who, in the second half of the 19th century, left by the thousands for abroad? Did they abandon their homeland as cowards do? Are the Catalans from inland, farmers and ranchers, who, driven by hunger and necessity, left their roots to make their fortune in the city, guilty of forgetting the traditions and customs that built the identity of our people?Let's go a little further: who is a better Catalan, Fanny, who came five years ago from Honduras and earns a living for herself and her two daughters by cleaning houses and building entrances, without a contract or social security contributions, charging twelve euros per hour, or Manel, who owns a pig farm in Pla de l'Estany managed by some dark-skinned men [sic] whom he hasn't registered or regularized because they don't have papers?What is an authentic Catalan? Who decides what it means to be Catalan? Is there anyone more qualified than the rest to separate the good Catalans from those who are not so good?

"There are many people who live and work here and will never be Catalan." This is how forceful Sílvia Orriols was, in a conference at Fòrum Europa Tribuna Catalunya, in mid-February. She was referring explicitly to the Muslim community in our country, because she considers their integration into Catalan society to be impossible. It was not the first time that the leader of Aliança Catalana, a declared Islamophobe, had made such a statement. It is part of a recurrent discourse that she has expressed since she arrived at the Ripoll Town Council in 2019. This stance clashes with the definition of Catalan identity traditionally defended by Catalanism. It is a total amendment to one of the most famous phrases of former president Jordi Pujol: "He is Catalan who lives and works in Catalonia and wants to be." During his long tenure, the leader of Convergència never tired of repeating this idea, a result of the debate about who was Catalan with the arrival between 1950 and 1970 of thousands of immigrants from various parts of Spain. Pujol defended civic integration, not integration by origin, under the premise that being Catalan did not depend on being born in Catalonia, but on wanting to be part of the country. He also sought to avoid social division for fear of creating two separate communities: that oforiginal Catalans and that of immigrants. And finally, with the desire for Catalanism to broaden its social base.