From the Guissona model, where the foreign-born population, 53% of the total, has grown at the pace of the expansion of this town in La Segarra, to that of Badalona, ??whose mayor, Xavier García Albiol , calls for “more orderly” immigration, a reception with nuances. Alongside the popular mayor, his counterparts from Guissona, Jaume Ars (Together); Badia del Vallès, Eva Menor (PSC), and Manresa, Marc Aloy (ERC), participated yesterday in the debate Immigration in advanced countries: problem or solution? , organized by the Economics Circle.
“Are we all welcome policies? I think not”, said García Albiol. “There are left-wing parties that tell everyone that we must welcome and that we must be here with open arms”, but “if we are a solidarity country I ask that we be consistent and that we give them roles, if we let them in to everyone, with all the consequences, that they can work and contribute, otherwise it is a speech of hypocrisy”, he added. The statement that the situation of irregularity can end up driving them “to begging, to collect scrap metal or to be perpetrators of crimes” deserved the repulsion of Eva Menor.
The mayor of Badia del Vallès defended that people who arrive from other countries “are an opportunity”, since “diversity creates value”. “Closing the doors to immigration has a cost that we cannot afford, immigration brings wealth”, he pointed out.
From different positions, there was agreement on the need to provide councils with more resources to promote better integration, and Marc Aloy reiterated the inconsistencies in the Foreigners’ Law. “We need labor but we collide with legislation that prevents regularization”, he lamented. “However, since we are very guarantors – he added – we give them education and healthcare, this is a contradiction”.
The debate coincided with the presentation this week of the UAB study La Catalunya dels 8 miliones, which concludes that “three out of four Catalans are a direct or indirect product of immigration”. The research points out that “the migration of the 21st century as a whole has contributed 1.5 million people compared to just over 200,000 natural growth” and that, “without this extraordinary weight of migrations, we would not I would understand the country’s demographic evolution, but not the economic, social or cultural one either.”
Against the 5.7% of citizens who arrived from other countries registered in Badia del Vallès; 15.7% of Badalona and 19% of Manresa, Guissona, with 53%, tells a positive story. The great expansion of BonÀrea in recent decades would not have been possible without the arrival of labor from other countries. “In the nineties of the last century, contracts were already made in origin, in Romania, Ukraine and Senegal”, explains the mayor of Guissona, Jaume Ars. “For us, immigration is an opportunity, and it also makes our population young”, he explained to the attendees, among whom were Jordi Pujol and his son Oriol.
García Albiol insisted on the duties of this collective: “We have a problem of adaptation to Catalan society”, while Ars clarified that the great challenge is “co-responsibility”, and Aloy, the management of arrivals .
