The partisan use of immigration by the right, now accusing Sánchez of promoting a “call effect”, is irresponsible and only contributes to fueling the daily avalanche of xenophobic hoaxes.
Sánchez seeks in Mauritania to stop the increase in arrivals to the Canary Islands due to the refugee crisis in Mali
Let’s start with the obvious. No one is born racist. Intolerance is fostered and learned. Just as equality can be taught, division can be fueled. Repeating a lie has been shown to increase the chances that many people will accept it as truth. This is known as the illusory truth effect, an increasingly common phenomenon in politics and journalism (the roles are often confused).
The 2023 annual report of the Forum for the Social Integration of Immigrants identifies some of the most widespread rumors about migrants: from “more than 25% of the population has a foreign nationality” to “public health is collapsing”, “they are a burden for migrants. Spain and they have more social benefits” or “they take away our jobs”. With different versions, these are comments that are heard at Sunday dinners as well as in unwanted tweets.
Even Elon Musk, Alvise Perez or Santiago Abascal, whose latest outrage was to urge the Spanish to “start defending themselves” against immigration, do not want to know the truth. They are the ones who lie without a mask, but there is a gray area in the speeches and articles in which racist discourse permeates.
Let’s go with the fact that migrants are causing doctor visits to collapse. According to data from the National Health Survey of the Ministry of Health and the INE, of the more than 16 million medical consultations carried out in the National Health System, only 1.7 million (11%) were for people born abroad.
Another hoax that circulates daily: the accusation that migrants hoard social assistance, the famous “paguita”. Here is the denial: according to the Report on the Minimum Insertion Income (2021), of the 305,340 minimum income recipients in Spain, 26.1% had foreign nationality. It should not be remembered that these benefits depend on the income and not the origin of the beneficiary, but it is obvious that not everyone understands this while there are still those who insist on spreading this lie. When the extreme right claims that the percentage of migrants who receive this aid is higher than the average, it is obvious that it is because of their situation of vulnerability and not because of the color of their skin. Regarding affiliation to Social Security, only 12.8% are people born outside (data from December 2023).
Official figures also confirm that between 2012 and 2023, the position of foreign nationals and dual nationals in the labour market has hardly changed. In the last quarter of 2023, the sector of “elementary trades” or “unskilled jobs” employed 26.1% of the migrant population.
It is not that Spain is an exception or a more racist country than others. Coinciding with the campaign for the last European elections, it was found that a fifth of the false messages detected and denied by the media approved as fact-checkers presented migrants as criminals. According to the data collected by this database, widespread lies in Sweden claimed that nine out of ten crimes were committed by people of foreign origin.
Faced with the daily avalanche of misinformation, manipulated images and decontextualized data, it is not enough to doubt their veracity or to look the other way. We must fight it because, as activist Angela Davis theorized, it is not enough to not be racist, we must be anti-racist.
The minimum that must be demanded of the parties is that they do not stir up base passions and that they understand that the migratory phenomenon cannot be managed alone from a community or by limiting themselves to negotiating a distribution of migrant minors. Funding is needed (the PP and the nationalist parties are right when they ask the government for money) to carry out cross-cutting policies that range from education to health and employment.
What the PP is wrong about, and in large part, is trying to extract electoral revenue from a phenomenon that is not always easy to manage but that it cannot ignore as it seems to do. Accusing Pedro Sánchez of being “irresponsible” and of encouraging a “call effect” for the signing of agreements with Mauritania, Gambia and Senegal, countries of origin of a good part of the immigrants who arrive on the shores of the Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla, is a capital error. A strategy that only serves to provide arguments for the hoaxes and half-truths that fuel racism. Migration must be addressed at the origin, in transit and at the destination. If Feijóo does not know it yet, they will explain it to him if he ever becomes president of the government.
The PP leader would do well to listen more to his Andalusian colleagues or to the president of Ceuta, Juan Jesús Vivas, and to distance himself from voices like that of the mayor of Badalona. The spokesperson for the Council, Carolina España, is one of the few in her party to have pointed out that Xavier García Albiol “was unlucky” with his famous tweet and subsequent racist statements. It is not new that Albiol associates migration with crime. Many other mayors, some located in municipalities adjacent to Badalona, are facing the difficulties (because they exist) related to the management of migration in several metropolitan districts. If Albiol is now reinforcing his ultra message (the one he hid during the campaign), it is because he feels that it will pay off. It is up to Feijóo to stop this dangerous drift, unless he decides to put the vote before coexistence.
