If a society is aware of what demographic changes cause, this is island society. It has been said many times and it is very true: Mallorca, for example, has been a kind of social laboratory where many of the economic ideas that have ended up shaping many parts of the West could be experimented with. A small, closed society, immensely devoted to a survival or agrarian economy, suddenly entered into a cycle of expansion, construction, demographic change, massive arrival of immigration, tourists, etc., which undid old ties, hierarchies, and cultures. Literature has made enough echo of this problem, while politics was responsible for either denying that anything too serious was happening, or for trying to steer it for the greatest benefit, in theory, of everyone, but in practice, of the political and economic elites.A society that is not capable of guaranteeing its basic survival structures is doomed to suicide, or to a perpetual identity crisis, which is beginning to be noticed as a continuity crisis, and also obviously, as an economic crisis. It is now in the rest of the Spanish state that a brutal population growth is being experienced, especially in this last decade. The economic model needs a lot of labor, and an aging population, dependent on care and with a very low birth rate among us, have finished fixing the pie.The 2008 real estate crisis slowed expansion, but from 2015 it began to grow again, now with more Europeans, Ukrainian refugees (more than 300,000), digital workers, etc. At no point has there been an explicit manifestation of the political desire to increase the population, however; citizens have seen the wave arrive without having been consulted, or without it having been clearly politically planned.However, the reforms of the immigration laws in 2022, and the facilities required at the same time by the EU, which is aware that Europe is aging and that the economy needs new blood, have now led to a point where one gets the impression that collapse is imminent, and not just in communities with non-Spanish languages, but everywhere. Such a wave required planning, as well as the capacity to integrate people and make them speak the language of the host country. From Spain, they know that people end up speaking Spanish out of obligation, what choice do they have, while Catalan speakers bow their heads and give up their language, which in the long run only increases the number of Spanish speakers by millions. It is one way among others of putting an end to non-Spanish languages, diluting them, and denying that demographics is a tool to achieve this objective, more than recurrent in the history of Spanish nationalism, it is a way of playing into its hands or whitewashing it. Spanish nationalism itself throws its hands up in the air when it finds that Spanish is no longer heard in certain neighborhoods or areas of the big capitals, a scandal that when it came from Catalan speakers was always mocked and stigmatized. Now it will be seen more than ever in favor of which language – not of which languages – the Spanish state is. Money has always spoken the language of those who handle it.
