Fed up with 21st-century slave owners
One of the best pieces of news these days has been the state government's announcement, twenty years after the last one, of a new regularization process for undocumented migrants residing in Spain. This is excellent news in terms of human rights and citizenship, even though the denial of human rights, including genocide, has become socially accepted today.
In a community like ours, with the highest percentage of foreign-born residents in the country, it is even more so, because having a significant percentage of residents without rights is unsustainable from many points of view, but above all from a purely humanistic perspective: you cannot simultaneously defend equality and the enslavement to which these people are subjected. It is immoral to live in a wealthy community while denying fundamental rights to those who have contributed and continue to contribute to generating this wealth, because most of those who will be eligible for regularization have been living and working here for years, but their administrative status condemns them to being second-class citizens.
Even business leaders have understood this, as the Church had already done, supporting, through organizations like Caritas, the collection of nearly 800,000 signatures promoted by various migrant groups. If the humanitarian arguments don't convince you, consider the economic pragmatism: maintaining the economic growth of the last twenty-five years requires 15,000 'extra' people each year, and currently we have more deaths than births and are even struggling to retain our population due to housing speculation.
I would add that we are also facing a democratic issue: regularization is not a random decision; it is the result of a popular legislative initiative with significant social support, although those who can regularize their immigration status will not be able to vote, no matter how much some politicians proclaim this falsehood.
And yet, Feijóo's PP has gone in just over a year from saying it welcomed regularization to criminalizing it. I don't know if it's out of envy for the far-right Vox party or because they don't care what business leaders or the Catholic Church say, and prefer what the many have been quick to attack, considering it a political decision contrary to their project of global apartheid.
If you give me a choice between what's happening in the United States these past few weeks, with racist ICE militias chasing entire families because of their skin color; with arbitrary arrests of adults and children deported or taken to concentration camps; with institutional violence and terror in the streets… and what's being processed here, I have no doubt about which I'd choose. I also wonder if there's still the slightest possibility of avoiding, in the medium term, what's happening on the other side of the Atlantic, which always seems to affect us, even if only indirectly. But I see the labels used by our regional leaders ('crime', 'pull factor', 'rigged'...), and I have my doubts, because they're indistinguishable from those used by the global far right. Nothing proclaimed these days can be backed up with scientific evidence. What I'm not so sure about is whether spending public resources to challenge the regularization process when it's not your responsibility doesn't rhyme with malfeasance... I'll stop, I'm getting worked up!
The Balearic Islands are not Trump's United States
Fortunately, the Balearic Islands are not Trump's United States, and what most islanders, whether newcomers or those with eight lineages, want is to live in peace and earn a decent living. Our streets are peaceful, sensible, and have things we like and things we don't, but we must acknowledge the effort of a society that has grown considerably and, despite the lack of a public policy to promote coexistence—neither right-wing nor left-wing—continues to move forward every day.
Let's change the subject. Or not. We're talking about Fitur, and the more than 1,000 people who died or went missing trying to reach our islands last year, who weren't even mentioned at the tourism fair, much to the industry's relief. How sad to boast of being a world power in certain areas, yet be unable to welcome those who respond to the constant call for labor in a sector that continues to expand.
As Bishop Taltavull publicly stated a few days ago, I too wonder why millions of tourists face no obstacles, while immigrants arriving in boats do. Like him, I also feel disgust for Christians who think this way. And I am absolutely certain that the pull factor is Fitur, not a regularization process that, in this paradise of inequality, will bring a semblance of social justice to those who need it most. I am fed up with defenders of freedom in the name of the right to own slaves. Fed up with 21st-century slave owners.
