In all the boats
He shipwreck of a boat in Portopetro A few days ago, the tragic toll of twenty people injured and one dead. I want to emphasize the word "person" in the previous sentence. Not immigrants, not undocumented immigrants, not victims of the mafia: people, human beings. None of their lives is worth less than any of ours.
Nor is it better, many will (apparently) reply. We often insist that it's a mistake to try to take the pulse of society through social media, because they give a distorted picture of reality: they exaggerate some ideas or opinions while downplaying, or hiding, others. Certainly, social media is not, as some would like to suppose, a paradise of free speech: rather, it offers an open bar preferably used by brothers-in-law, provocateurs, and social arsonists who hide in anonymity. Their owners—be they Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or Zhang Yiming—have decided so. But, nevertheless, however unrepresentative these networks may be of our reality, as long as they reflect a sliver of truth about what we Mallorcans, Menorcans, Ibizans, and Formentera residents are today, there is plenty of reason to be concerned. You only have to read the comments generated by news stories like the Portopetro boat tragedy, or any other news related to the arrival of immigrants through illegal means, to realize we have a problem. A problem of racism.
Racism is essentially the result of fear, which is what politicians who associate immigration, legal or illegal, with crime are best at manipulating. Our president, Marga Prohens, constantly comes out to make a speech against immigration mafias, which are like squatters: they exist, but they are the smallest, almost anecdotal, part of a much broader and more complex problem. Trying to reduce the immigration issue to a cheap movie about super-bad gangsters emboldened by the left's "bonismo" (goodwill) woke (two words that only serve to express the lack of credibility and intellectual unworthiness of those who use them) is, in addition to a fallacy, a mistake. A mistake that could cost us all dearly.
The worst thing you can do with a problem is deny it, and also think it can be solved simply by applying a heavy hand against the weakest and most vulnerable. It's also pointless to lament how things were "before" (with the aggravating factor that you never truly remember what that "before" was like: you only evoke the mirage of an idealized past). The new citizens of the Balearic Islands who arrived as immigrants are here and will stay here. Their children and grandchildren, too. How their arrival and integration among us is managed and articulated is, along with climate change, the most important debate Europe (the Balearic Islands are in Europe) will have in the coming years. Absolutely everything depends on it, from the future of the economy to that of the Catalan language.
That's why the reaction can't be that of President Prohens: embracing the far-right Vox movement and its xenophobic rhetoric and measures. Immigration must be a national policy (I write 'country' in reference to the Balearic Islands), debated and agreed upon by everyone except, precisely, the far right, for obvious reasons of democratic dignity and well-being. Meanwhile, let's not forget that the harm caused by 4,323 immigrants arriving in small boats is minimal—even if it were twice as many—compared to the havoc that can be wreaked by governments that legislate in favor of construction companies, real estate developers, and speculative funds.