The problematization of immigration, xenophobic hoaxes and the common thread that the extreme right and the PP have woven during the summer between migrants and crime have emerged in a CEI survey that reveals that immigration is the first problem in Spain according to the Spaniards, even if they admit that it does not affect them in their daily lives.
The latest CEI barometer reveals something surprising. For the first time in two decades, the Spanish have declared that their country’s main problem is immigration. The idea was born this summer, between June and September, with the aim of increasing the number of canoes arriving on the coast, the attempts to cross the barriers and 5,000 minors waiting in the Canary Islands for someone to want to welcome them out of “solidarity”, as the PP Feijóo proposes not to do by law. They continue to wait.
In this same barometer, a few pages further down, the question is asked “what problem affects you the most”. Immigration is no longer as relevant and falls to fifth place. What affects the Spanish and, therefore, what is their immediate problem?: housing, health, quality of employment and, above all, “economic problems”. That is, that the salary does not cover the supermarket and much less the purchase or rental, that you make an appointment with the doctor and he gives it to you in two weeks, that there are no clear prospects of earning more money or that the schedule prevents you from balancing things.
It is not completely illogical that the two questions do not match, it is something that has happened in many other barometers: one thing is what affects you and another is the overall idea you have of the issues that constitute challenges or social problems for your country. What is worrying is to see how the constant problematization of immigration – an idea that comes from the extreme right and that circulates throughout Europe and that has given such good results to those who have the least social scruples – has intensified in a few months, at the time of the political debate in Spain on the arrival of cayucos and minors from the Canary Islands.
There have been whole weeks of talking about “menas”, racist hoaxes, statements with all their derivatives in Congress, rallies, Vox roaring and PP raising the stakes and dancing a water that, finally, has had a reflection in society. or at least in the public response he gave to the CEI pollsters. If there is so much discussion, if there is so much indignation and division, it will become a problem.
In June, immigration affected just over 11.2% of the population. During the summer – which coincides with a significant increase in migrant arrivals but also with the political and media use of fear and hatred of the other – this figure rose to 30%, topping what is considered Spain’s main problem. From June to September, it became the greatest social concern.
Migration is an extraordinary challenge, there is no denying it, with its obstacles and its opportunities. Now, if for three months the arrival of 5,000 children is made a high-level political problem (there are 300 minors per autonomous community in a country of 48 million inhabitants), if the arrivals in Ceuta are made a threat (2,000 in this country per year), if these arrivals are linked to crime, as Feijóo did, if they are said to be rapists, as Díaz Ayuso did, if Abascal encourages the Spanish to “start defending themselves”, if social networks are filled with alleged episodes of crimes that have not even happened in Spain, if every cayuco that arrives appears on television – even though the real gateway for migrants is the Barajas planes -, if reception is a problem of enormous dimensions, if there is no solidarity between territories and we abandon those that form the border… In other words, if the context is not given or if the one that is given is unbalanced and is always treated in the negative, the result is obvious: Spain has an immigration problem even if the Spaniards, when asked about their In this case, it does not affect them.
