The Government proposes to finance municipalities based on the size of their migrant population.

BarcelonaThe Catalan government is considering creating a fund to finance municipalities based on their migrant population, aiming to improve their reception services and reduce their dependence on subsidies. This is one of the proposals from the Committee of Experts for Social Transformation and Innovation (CETIS) of the Department of Social Rights, which presented a report on Monday detailing the situation of the 1.4 million foreigners living in Catalonia, a country with a population of 8 million. The Catalan Fund for Reception and Inclusion seeks to provide Catalan mayors with more tools to better plan for the arrival of immigrants, offering them a fixed budget that goes beyond the current subsidy programs and ad hoc plans that often end without having delivered the desired results because, quite simply, the expected results have been achieved. At the presentation of the report, the Minister of Social Rights, Mònica Martínez Bravo, indicated that the fund could be integrated into the new program for local governments, and that the Generalitat's future budgets, if approved, will include additional funding to support this group, following the agreement between the PSC and Comuns parties. The fund proposal is still just an idea, but it has the backing of the Minister, who declined to specify which public policies or initiatives it might finance. In this regard, she referred to the fact that municipalities are aware of the real "needs" of each town in order to decide how to invest the funds. At a time when far-right groups are fighting policies that promote social cohesion, the Minister stated that the Catalan Government will be "very vigilant in ensuring compliance with the law" in those local councils that attempt to circumvent the law and discriminate against or criminalize migrants.

The opportunity

The experts at CETIS, led by Gemma Pinyol-Jiménez, emphasize the "opportunity" that immigration represents for Catalonia: it has already saved the country from demographic decline and helped to revitalize the economy, making its contribution to GDP greater than the social spending it entails. The document advocates for "embracing" the diversity of the new Catalans; they reject creating specific policies for this group and, on the contrary, indicate that the way forward is to adapt the structure of the welfare state to the inequalities that are growing due to social, healthcare, housing, and educational needs. Martínez Bravo stressed that it is "unfair" to blame immigration for all the ills of Catalan society, echoing the CETIS report, which confirms that investment in social services has not grown at the same rate as the population and, therefore, has led to strained services and long waiting lists. In this spirit of empathizing with migrants, experts also propose taking action against the prevailing hate speech in certain sectors, so that the population stops blaming foreigners for the decline of public services. They suggest offering an inclusive narrative through a new Pact for Coexistence, which should replace the 2008 Immigration Pact. This new pact includes, among other initiatives, the inclusion of the history of migration and the disastrous consequences of colonialism in school curricula. Furthermore, along these same lines, they advocate for the dissemination, especially among young people and on social media, of local best practices for civic cohesion and the positive contributions of migrants, in order to create a new narrative that values ​​diversity. One of the major obstacles to implementing cohesion policies is the significant lack of coordination between administrations with jurisdiction over migration. In this regard, there is a willingness to implement the Catalan Migration Agency, an organization created by a 2010 law that has been shelved without a budget or assigned staff.