It's the economy, stupid! (Not demographics)
In the debate on the state of the region, the president recently placed the demographic issue at the center of the political debate. Population growth—in practice, a subterfuge to avoid directly addressing immigration—has become the center of the debate because part of the political class specializes in creating new problems instead of providing effective solutions to existing ones. In fact, I'll just remind you that just a month ago, the regional government was exposed when the Civil Society Forum revealed the data from the survey by the same government's Tourism Strategy Agency, which indicated that what really bothers a large part of the citizenry is the number of tourists we have.
Demographic dynamics—and the objective population growth that the Balearic Islands have experienced in recent decades—are not the cause of other problems, but rather the consequence of current economic dynamics. The Maltese archipelago, for example, has long accepted that to maintain its pace of economic growth (and we're talking about a territory and economy much smaller than the Balearic Islands), it needs more than 10,000 additional workers each year. They openly state this, but ignore the fact that what's arriving are people, not just labor, with lives and dreams beyond that utilitarian vision.
It wouldn't be difficult to establish a similar calculation for the Balearic Islands. Except for the COVID-19 hiatus, the Balearic Islands' GDP has grown by more than 170% since 2000. Wages and per capita income haven't grown in the same proportion. The population has grown by 34.9% over the same period, more than any other Spanish region. 80% thanks to immigration. In short, it can be easily estimated that to maintain an average economic growth rate of 2.70%, as we have recorded since the beginning of the millennium, we need an average growth of 1.25%, that is, a minimum of 13,282 more people each year, which obviously will not come through births. And here, the low birth rates are determined by social changes that are not exclusive to the Islands, but here, we also have the impossibility of developing a life plan and a family thanks to housing speculation.
As a social scientist, the lack of honesty of politicians who play at confusing causes and consequences exasperates me, especially when accompanied by measures and, above all, discourse that criminalize a portion of the population. Especially in a land like ours, where today one in four people was born in another country, and the majority of society has experienced migration. If we want to touch the key of population (or immigration), we must decisively address the transformation of an economic sector that, in addition to eating into other productive sectors with a higher added value—and the workers necessary for these other sectors to function—requires more tourists every year and more people to serve these tourists or to work in the services than work in the services.
It also exasperates me that in the face of a phenomenon such as transit migration (yes, in transit, because more than 95% of the people who arrive by boat don't even stay in the Balearic Islands), instead of focusing the efforts of the administrations on guaranteeing temporary reception in accordance with rights-based standards, the European Commissioner "deploys Frontex," which is nothing more than a security agency that in any case will ensure that boats are not seen on our shores. Because one comes to think that what's really bothering is this: the images of a human tragedy, sometimes including corpses, incompatible with the happiness industry that tourism seeks to represent. If the problem isn't seen, will it cease to exist? By the way, if you review the latest Frontex annual reports, you'll see that the Algerian route, which is now so worrying and so obvious to everyone, isn't for the most expensive agency in the entire EU.
Wouldn't it have been much more necessary and urgent to go see the European Commissioner for Housing, now that, for the first time since the last elections, there is one? Isn't this, truly, a problem that affects more and more islanders, regardless of our origins? Well no, it's better to invent new problems and leave the interests of the main beneficiaries of all this intact. "It's the economy, stupid!" Bill Clinton cried in the 1990s. And yes, it's the economy, not demographics, that's the real problem. Behind the migration dynamics, behind the housing problems, behind the environmental destruction. Let's continue.
