“It is not necessary to demonstrate that the immigrant did not come to eat anyone’s bread, but his and no other. He didn’t come to that or come to that. ” Extracted from the emblematic 1964 book The other Catalansthis appointment of the writer Paco Candel (Casas Altas, 1925 – Barcelona, 2007), of whom the centenary of his birth is currently fulfilled, and heading a newly study in which CCOO analyzes the population of foreign origin in Catalonia.
Coordinated by the sociologist of the Ciprian Els Altres Catalans i Catalanes of Segle XXI He concludes that, just as in the past, “migrants have not come to subtract occupation to people born in Spain, but to occupy the jobs they do not want or want.”
The data is clear. Since 2000, Catalunya has experienced a spectacular population growth, from six million inhabitants to eight. If at the beginning of the century, people born outside Spain registered in Catalonia were only 253,000 – a 4% of the population – today this figure already exceeds the million and a half of people – concluded 1,650,000, more than 21% of the population.
With a birth rate and unemployment and upward employment, after exceeding the 2008 crisis and the parenthesis of the pandemic, the truth is that 95% of the growth of the active population in Catalonia between 2010 and 2023, which was 400,000 workers, has been of people born abroad. This explains why 26% of the salaried population in Catalonia is today of foreign origin, not counting the one working in the irregular or submerged economy.
According to the study of CCOO, the majority of the population of foreign origin occupies in Catalonia the most precarious jobs in the less desired economic sectors. This situation, which often implies developed trades or professions well below its qualification, with lower salaries, more risks in occupational health, more temporality and, ultimately, more precariousness, is a homologous to which immigration lived from the rest of Spain during the twentieth century.
It already happened with the first major wave of immigrants during the first third of the century, just when Candel emigrated with his parents, in 1927, of the Valencian region of the Rincón de Ademuz to the Barcelona that built the international exhibition on the slope of Montjuïc opposed to which, on the side of the free zone, he was populated with barracks and working neighborhoods. And it happened with the second wave, the one that Candel, a neighbor of the free zone, portrayed between the fifties and seventies, in full postwar period, dictatorship and Francoist development.
In the penultimate chapter, Candel writes that The other Catalans It is not “a scientific, rigorous or mathematical study on immigration.” It clarifies that its pages are “a series of observations made around a class and an environment that in all aspects is ours.” And that us that is equated with the others The title is not alone, or mainly, in a national key, but of class. This was what Candel said to his friend and journalist Josep Maria Huertas Clavería in a 1964 interview: “The other Catalans They are, above all, an ultranza defense of the poor immigrant, immersed in the proletariat. ”
Today, as yesterday, they are common problems well known to newcomers: the difficulty in accessing decent housing, child poverty, labor exploitation and social exclusion. With the difference, between the immigration of the twentieth and current century, which, against the collective imaginary, is extraordinary to increase the educational level of the population of foreign origin, already very similar to that of the population born in Spain.
In 2017, for the first time, the number of registered in Catalonia of foreign origin exceeded those born in the rest of Spain. There is more new other Catalans of the third migratory wave that old Other Catalans of the second wave. According to data from the register, of the 1,650,000 people of foreign origin who lived in Catalonia in 2022, just over half a million had obtained Spanish nationality, which represents almost a third of all of them. But, in turn, a quarter of migrants of extra -community origin registered in Catalonia are in an irregular situation. That is, they not only lack nationality, but of work permit or residence.
Of all these new other CatalansLatin Americans are the predominant collective: they represent 43.2% of residents born outside Spain. Second, there is the population of African origin, followed by the people born in some other country in the European Union. In both cases, and against the popular imaginary, its percentages have been progressively reduced. On the contrary, during the first quarter of the 21st century, the percentage of the Catalan population of Asian origin has almost doubled and, to a lesser extent, that of people born in a non -community European country.
In summary, the immigration profile has changed. It is much more plural and diverse in origins, languages, cultures and religions. However, many of the problems that Candel already described in The other Catalans. The context is no longer that of the Franco dictatorship. Paradoxically, the imperfect democracy in Spain, a self -government of Catalonia undermined by one and the other in the long decade of the Process, The cuts in the welfare state, the general loss of class consciousness and the rise of the extreme right have configured a perverse frame.
Growing social inequalities, the Law of Aliens and European Migratory Restrictions, as well as the identity and conservative cultural withdrawal, make it difficult to get out of exclusion to thousands of people. In addition, already difference from Other Catalans From before, they were definitely Spanish, the vast majority of today’s migrants do not have recognized basic citizenship rights because they are of foreign origin. Without going any further, between a fifth and a quarter of the Catalan population cannot vote.
Precisely the right to vote, the struggle for democracy, freedoms and social and national rights were key to the socialization and cohesion of Other Catalans in the idea of Catalunya, a poor sun. Candel himself was one of the most voted senators in Spain, in 1977, and Councilor for L’Hospitalet de Llobregat by the PSUC, in 1979. Accompanied by activist Josep Benet, the communist leader Antoni Gutiérrez Díaz and the unionist Cipriano García, Candel set a pitch for coexistence in democratic Catalan that was common to the workers’ PSUC, to the socialist left of Joan Reventós (which contributed to The other Catalans with 12,000 pesetas) and the bourgeois and democratian nationalism of Jordi Pujol (which contributed data for the book).
Today, with the extreme right and booming xenophobia, the idea of Catalonia as a single town requires an urgent update. Candel already said in 1964 that it was a “preponderant opinion, both by the Catalans and the Non-Catalanes, which Catalonia does not admit to immigrants.” And he needed: “There is a certain segregation, but not for reasons of origin, but for reasons of social level. And as the immigrant – the majority – belongs to a lower economic level than the rest of the country’s residents, here is this visible separation. ”
Something similar now happens with the new migrants. Hence, this maxim that “it is Catalan who lives and works in Catalonia.” The appointment is attributed interchangeably to Candel, Josep Benet, Cipriano García, Antoni Gutiérrez Díaz and Jordi Pujol. Whoever was the father, the meaning marks perfectly with a writer like Candel who, before the success of The other Catalansit was already known for social content novels as There is a youth that awaits, where the city changes its name and They have killed a man, they have broken a landscape.
The communists identified their potential to raise class awareness to the point that, in 1959, Candel himself picked up in his dietary that the clandestine station of the PCE Pyrenean radio spoke of him as “paladin of the suburb and the proletariat.” It is no accident that to his other great essay after The other Catalans I put him in title Being worker is no bargain. Perhaps it should be updated or reissued, just as Edicions 62 has just done with Els Altres Catalans. Thus, all Catalans and Catalans who live and work in Catalonia, including that quarter of the population that is of foreign origin, could identify their national and class condition with parameters of the 21st century.
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