Notes on a non-debate in Barcelona about immigration

While the debate on immigration in Britain is accelerating rapidly, questioning the country's high levels of immigration is still taboo in Spain. The media actively smear anyone who does so. The following reflections, which I previously published in Spanish, are about my personal experience of trying unsuccessfully to have a civilised discussion about the issue within Barcelona’s “polite society”.

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I recently experienced first-hand what happens when polite society ceases to be polite because it feels threatened and tries to defend its power.

It happened when I was invited to speak at a small seminar in Barcelona with a group of about 25 participants. The idea was to open a debate among the attendees on the controversial topic of immigration, which is still not openly discussed in the Spanish mainstream media. I was invited because, at the beginning of the year, I had published an essay on this same topic entitled Barcelona, a Demographic Revolution in its english version, with the same objective: to promote debate in Catalan society, a debate that is conspicuous by its absence.

The event organisers emphasised that I and another speaker should start the debate, but that it should take place among the participants and not between participants and speakers. The idea was to have a civilised conversation about a controversial topic.

It was not a public event, and I have not asked for permission to talk about it. For this reason, I will not mention any names, neither of the organisers nor of the participants, nor of the other speaker who spoke after me. None of these details are relevant to the development of my arguments.

Most of the participants came from the progressive-liberal camp and shared a strong Catalan identity. I would say that most of them work at Catalan universities, in Catalan public institutions and in other Catalan entities financed with public money.

In my brief presentation, I summarised the most important points of my essay. I said that what is happening is a real demographic revolution: in the near future, there will be more inhabitants of foreign origin than native Catalans and Spaniards in Catalonia due to the collapse of the birth rate and unprecedented mass immigration. I argued that the two issues of greatest concern to Barcelona residents, security and housing, are directly related to immigration, although establishing this connection is taboo in our public discourse. I also stated that immigration will not save the welfare state, as is claimed. I also pointed out that a multicultural society inevitably generates uncontrollable and increasingly violent conflicts. And, above all, that a large part of Barcelona's native society is behaving like the frog in boiling water. They are unaware that the life and culture they cherish and take for granted are on the verge of disappearing in the not too distant future.

I was familiar with the political context of this event (and that of almost all events in Barcelona) and suspected in advance that my ideas would not be particularly popular among the participants. But what I did not imagine was that almost no one would show the slightest interest in seriously discussing the arguments I raised.

There was practically no conversation among the participants, contrary to what had been proposed and what I had naively imagined. Almost no one shared a reflection that took what I had said seriously.

However, several participants had read my essay in advance and clearly came with the intention of discrediting me.

One participant attempted to cast doubt on my credentials and scientific methods, and another contemptuously claimed that my ideas were part of current far-right trends and that my essay reminded him of Hitler.

At first, I thought I had misunderstood him because, despite my German origins, no one had ever compared me to Hitler before. It was quite a revelation.

It is also true that some participants strongly agreed with some or all of the ideas I had presented and approached me at the end of the event to express their support and even their discomfort with their personal experiences with immigration, whether at their children's school or in their apartment block in Barcelona’ Eixample district, where there are hardly any native residents left. As one participant also told me, the fact that some people didn’t voice their opinion during the seminar is a common phenomenon, known as the spiral of silence: when an individual in a group fears that their opinion will not be well received, they tend to be more reserved and remain silent. They do not express their opinion because they fear damaging their reputation in the group or even in society at large.

I was stunned when one of the participants said that everything I had said was correct, but that he strongly disagreed with it. I got the impression that, in his opinion, I was right, but he found it deeply uncomfortable to talk about the subject, as if what I was saying broke a taboo that should not be broken.

Furthermore, this person was of South American origin. It is possible that he felt uncomfortable talking about immigration issues because it is a very personal matter and he feared that this debate could increase xenophobia. I share this fear, but I believe it is more a consequence of uncontrolled immigration than of trying to talk about it in a civilised manner.

In any case, those who led the way at this event and, in general, among the cultural, political and social elites of Barcelona, continue to be those who believe that, broadly speaking, immigration is not a problem.

Those who tried to defame me at this seminar considered me part of the right-wing threat against which anything goes.

I did not manage to find out exactly what they think, beyond their rejection of my ideas, but I have no doubt that they misinterpret or are unaware of the consequences that the demographic revolution will have for Catalan society and, in particular, for themselves.

I would like to highlight some thoughts that have come to mind since the event:

Two participants in this seminar accused me of not presenting my paper in Catalan. It was a way of reproaching me for not having made enough effort to integrate in order to lecture them on their immigration policies. Who was I to say anything to them if I had not even made the effort to learn Catalan?

I would have liked to give my presentation in Catalan, but as I express myself much better in Spanish, I did not. When I first came to live in Barcelona in 1986, I was 17 years old and immediately got to know many local people, but their mother tongue was Spanish, so it was natural for me to learn their language. At the German School in Barcelona, where I completed my secondary education, the language of communication among the pupils was neither Catalan nor German, but Spanish. So I speak Spanish better not because of a lack of effort to integrate, but because of life circumstances. Furthermore, we must not forget that for most people in Barcelona, Spanish is the everyday language.

But the irony of the story is that the ultimate reason for my intervention in this seminar, which upset some people so much, was precisely to preserve the culture of this country, including its language.

I really like Catalan; I have always found it a beautiful language. The songs of Lluis Llach, María del Mar Bonet and other Catalan artists have been part of my life since I first came to live here almost forty years ago. I love this country, its culture, its people and its language, and it saddens me immensely that, at the rate we are going, replacing the native population, all this is going to be ruined.

Thanks to the Spanish Transition and the devolution of powers to regional governments, Catalonia has been able to establish the hegemony of the Catalan language in institutions over the last four decades, but the multicultural society we are moving towards will cause native Catalans to lose power over institutions in the not too distant future.

Those who accused me of disparaging Catalan are unable to see that they are going to lose control over the institutions that allow their discourse to be dominant, and to which, in many cases, they owe their own professional status and economic stability.

They cannot comprehend the magnitude of the change that is coming. They are unaware that I am not the threat to them, but rather that the demographic revolution will cause Catalan culture and language to survive only in fragmented niches.

If I have correctly interpreted the discourse of Catalonia's progressive and liberal elites and their representatives at this seminar, they have complete confidence in the tolerance and integrative capacity of Catalan society towards the new Catalans coming from many parts of the world. If Catalonia has been able to successfully welcome hundreds of thousands of immigrants from southern Spain over the last century, why should it not be able to integrate the current generations of immigrants from other parts of the world?

It should be noted that Catalans, Andalusians, Galicians, etc., have been sharing the Spanish cultural space for centuries and are not very different culturally, just as Latin American immigrants integrate relatively well thanks to the common language and cultural roots.

Although it is probably true that, for reasons of mentality, the margin of tolerance towards people from other cultures is higher in Spain than in some other European countries, as immigration from North Africa and Asia increases, so does the potential for ethnic conflict between cultures whose values are often difficult to reconcile.

Furthermore, Catalans' tolerance of different cultural expressions, such as the hijab or burqa, does not necessarily imply better integration. In fact, the opposite may be true. When cultural and religious diversity is celebrated, as Catalan institutions do, the message conveyed is that assimilation into the local culture is not necessary. Learning Catalan will suffice. The word 'integration' loses its meaning. The aim instead becomes establishing rules that manage the sensitivities of different ethnic groups in a multicultural society.

Parents with children at public schools in Barcelona and many other Catalan towns, as well as teachers, are well aware of how difficult, and sometimes even impossible, teaching has become due to growing cultural diversity. Like those who live in working-class neighbourhoods alongside people from different cultures and use public transport daily, they bear the brunt of the consequences of a multicultural society.

However, if you live in Barcelona’s wealthy district of Sant Gervasi, send your children to private school and rarely use the underground, you can continue to convince yourself that there is no real problem with current immigration, and that those who protest or vote for the populist right are either racist or unable to adapt to normal and inevitable modern societal changes.

This was the mindset adopted by the Spanish media when reporting on the events of July in Torre Pacheco, a small southern Spanish town, where violence broke out after an elderly local man was attacked by North African migrants. The media downplayed the incident, focusing instead on how the Spanish far right had exploited the events for their own political ends and on reports that far-right extremists had called for immigrants to be hunted down.

While all this was certainly true, the Spanish mainstream media failed to tell the whole truth and instead made the facts fit their pre-established narrative.

What happened in Torre Pacheco was significant not because of a few criminals and racists, but because it was a manifestation of the weariness felt by many peaceful, ordinary people due to uncontrolled immigration from North Africa. Many Spanish towns are no longer places where people can live normally; for example, girls are afraid to walk alone on the street or dress as they please. (I find this testimony from a woman in Torre Pacheco authentic and sincere, and it sums up what motivated many residents of this town to protest.)

The recent violent riots in the streets of Salt, Mataró and Sabadell show the potential for conflict that already exists in many Catalan towns. The demographic revolution that has only just begun will not calm this situation down, but will most likely escalate it, no matter how much the media lies about it and no matter how many new integration programmes the Catalan government launches.

At the rate we are going, at some point in the next ten years there will be more inhabitants of Barcelona born outside Spain than native Spaniards. Anyone who thinks that the result of this revolution will be peaceful coexistence while maintaining the essence of the Catalan and Spanish way of life is not thinking straight. At no point in human history, anywhere in the world, has such an experiment worked. It will not work here either.

To paraphrase the American journalist Christopher Caldwell, Catalonia cannot remain the same with a different population.

In a way, this seminar was a symptom of the crisis or even the collapse of liberalism that we are experiencing.

Several seminar participants were outraged because, in their opinion, the growing critical discourse on irregular immigration in the US and other European countries, which they claim my ideas reflect, jeopardises the rights of migrants and violates international law.

They see the world through the prism of liberalism.

The liberal ideal is to free the individual from any kind of constraints, whether customs, norms, traditional institutions or borders. This ideology has no room for a sense of belonging to a culture and nation, nor for the desire to preserve customs and traditions.

As we in the West have been under the influence of this ideology for centuries and have gone through a phase of hyper-liberalism in recent decades, we are already getting closer and closer to this supposed ‘ideal’. There are not many traditions left to abolish, and traditional institutions such as the family, marriage and the Church have lost their importance in our society.

Now, all that remains to replace all these institutions that made society function is the state, the law and individual rights.

From a liberal perspective, individual rights are sacred: they cannot be touched in any way, for any reason.

From this same perspective, in which the liberalisation of the individual is a never-ending story of ever-increasing progress, the next step in the project seems to be the elimination of the distinction between national and foreign citizens, as well as the very idea of nationality, turning it into something similar to a gym membership, as Mary Harrington says: ‘You show up, pay your taxes, and you're in.’

The liberal prism is present in all areas of our lives, so we often do not even realise that the conclusions derived from this ideology and the political measures proposed are, from the point of view of common sense, often absurd and, in some cases, even very harmful.

If I say that we are experiencing a major crisis of liberalism, and even its collapse, it is because, from a liberal perspective, it will be impossible to find coherent answers to our current major crises. From a perspective of liberalism, it is not even recognised that mass immigration, combined with the collapse of the birth rate, calls into question the survival of our Western societies.

I am convinced that, if we continue to comply with international legal frameworks such as the Geneva Convention and the European Court of Human Rights, we will not be able to stop irregular immigration to Spain and Europe as I believe is necessary. As these frameworks are unlikely to be reformed any time soon, national sovereignty would have to prevail (in line with the current debate in Britain).

If this were to happen, it would obviously mean a change in the rights of people wishing to emigrate to Europe.

However, the national and international rules and institutions created to protect the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, including the Geneva Convention and the European Court of Human Rights, were established at a time when migration to Europe from other continents was very low. At that time, it was impossible to foresee what would happen 70 years later. This legal framework is completely inadequate for the current era of mass migration worldwide.

Are legal frameworks not there to solve our problems? I have never read anywhere that laws and legal frameworks are set in stone and cannot be changed. Not being able to modify individual rights when the stability, peace and survival of our culture are at stake is madness.

That is why it seems necessary to move away from the prism of liberalism and start using common sense.

It is obvious that the alternative to the liberal prism does not involve promoting xenophobia, treating migrants without dignity or failing to help war refugees or persecuted people. Quite the contrary: establishing and enforcing rules that protect our society and culture will allow us to help those who need us most in a much more focused and effective way.

The history of humanity is full of examples of cultures that have disappeared because they were too weak; I hope that Catalonia can avoid this tragic fate.