"A black and/or Muslim and Catalan-speaking Mallorca would not be any substitution"

According to the theses of the European populist and nationalist right, a 'Great Replacement' is being orchestrated: a demographic replacement in Western societies, especially with the arrival of North African and sub-Saharan immigration. All this, according to the theory, would have been conceived by pro-European elites, who would want to accelerate this ethnic substitution, behind which there could even be the Jews, the typical international Jewish conspiracy, which would have nothing else to do now but pull strings, vengefully, to erase European whiteness. It is a theory that has had great success, because everyone fears cultural or ethnic disappearance to some degree, and it owes its intellectual formulation to a book by Renaud Camus. The white supremacist terrorist who in 2019 murdered 51 people in New Zealand while attacking two mosques had adopted this same thesis, and had titled his seventy-page criminal manifesto after Camus's book, in which he considered Muslim immigration an existential threat to Western societies. This terrorist had a European precedent, the fanatic who in 2011 murdered 77 people in Norway based on these same theses, an event about which a Netflix film has now been made.

In the Norway of this latest terrorist, immigration did not even reach 13%, even though in certain neighborhoods of the capital it could be much higher. Official projections still estimate that immigrants and children of immigrants may reach 25% by the year 2060, but of these only a very small part will be Muslims and Africans by origin… Norway's future projections, however, are already our demographic snapshot of the present, especially considering that only 60% of the population of Catalonia, for example, was born here, there is more than 25% of the population born abroad and 13.5% born in the rest of Spain. That is to say, the Norwegian terrorist lived in a reality half as 'diverse' as ours, considering that in Mallorca, for example, 28.4% of residents were born abroad. With 13%, it was enough for the Norwegian to get too nervous… But in demography – and sociolinguistics – there is a perfectly legitimate question: under what conditions can sustained immigration transform the composition of a society so much that the pre-existing population, language, and culture cease to reproduce themselves as the majority? All of this is very legitimate to ask, and it is precisely when these debates are not spoken about openly that people go crazy and fall into conspiracy theories. For all this old-fashioned and more or less violent right wing, substitution occurs if they stop seeing white men and women. But a black and/or Muslim and Catalan-speaking Mallorca would not be a substitution, as it is a Castilianized Mallorca, for example, where you cannot even take a taxi without changing language. Ultimately, perhaps the problem is not who arrives or the color of their skin, but whether the society that welcomes them still knows what it wants to continue to be.