36 Europe TheEconomistDecember4th 2021
immigration.For a regional election in Ma
drid in May, it put up posters contrasting
the cost of looking after migrants who are
unaccompanied minors with pensions for
older Spaniards. It is a paradox that Vox
does particularly well in areas along the
Mediterranean coast where farmers de
pend on Moroccan and other African la
bourers for the harvest.
“Racism isn’t a monopoly of Vox,” but
racists feel empowered by its stance, says
Mr Gueye. There has been an increase in re
ports of racist attacks, though they remain
rare. “There’s a breeding ground in favour
of hatred in Europe from which Spain is
not exempt,” says Jesús Perea, the deputy
minister for migration.
One of the first acts of Pedro Sánchez,
the Socialist prime minister, when he took
office in 2018 was to welcome a shipload of
630 immigrants stranded off Italy. As mi
gration routes have moved westwards
again, the government is now more cau
tious. “We have to strike a balance between
security and solidarity,” says Mr Perea. He
remains optimistic. “The general dayto
day attitude in Spain is better than in other
countries in Europe,” he claims. Spaniards
recall that many of them emigrated in the
1950s and 1960s in search of a better life. It
helps, too, that immigrants are spread out
across the country, rather than concentrat
ed in ghettos. In a recent poll 56% of Span
iards saw immigration positively.
Spain faces a test and a choice. The test
is to ensure that the second generation,
only now growing up in numbers, inte
grates successfully. A warning came in 2017
with terrorist attacks in Catalonia perpe
trated by a group of young men who had ar
rived from Morocco as small children.
They were apparently well integrated.
They spoke Catalan, had jobs and played in
a local football team, but were recruited by
a jihadist preacher. However, such cases
are rare. A survey in 2014 found “no indica
tors of cultural rejection...among immi
grants or their children”. More recent stud
ies have found a higher risk that children
of immigrants drop out of school. Few se
nior jobs are held by African immigrants or
their children, so role models are scarce.
The choice is whether to admit more
immigrants. Some say Spain needs them.
Even more than in most rich countries,
Spain’s fertility rate has tumbled, from
three children per woman in 1964 to 1.2 to
day. So in the future fewer workers will
have to support a lot more pensioners, un
less Spain raises the retirement age or lets
in more young immigrants, or both. The
government estimates that, even if it suc
ceeds in bringing the effective retirement
age into line with the legal one, which is
gradually being raised to 67, Spain will
need an extra 6m7m workers by 2040 to
meet its pension bill. Some 250,000 a year
will need to come from abroad. Many Spaniards remain welcoming.
After a campaign by ngos the government
in October made it easier for young mi
grants to get work permits when they turn
18 and leave reception centres. “These
youths shouldn’t have to be wandering the
streets for three years until they get pa
pers,” says Emilia Lozano, a retired shopworker who has organised beds and train
ing for some. Small towns across the de
populating interior want immigrants to
keep their schools, shops and bars open.
Even as Spanish society has changed radi
cally in a generation, the countryhas re
mained generally easygoing. Thatcancon
tinue, but it will take more work.nImmigrant waves
SpainSources:INE;UNHCR *Year to November 21st86420
1998 2005 10 15 20Foreign-bornpopulation,m
15.23.%oftotal
population6040200
21*20191817162015Migrant arrivals by sea, ’“W
iththestrokeofa pen”isa
phrase usually used metaphor
ically. But just a single stroke differ
entiates the two forms of the name of a
Spanish city: “Valencia” (in Spanish) and
“València” (in the regional language). A
leftwing regionalist party recently
kicked off a debate in Spain’s Senate by
insisting on “València” as the only spell
ing—even in Spanish (which does not
have the letter è).
Spain’s regional squabbles are often
this tiny. Some Catalans detect an insult
in the use of the letter ñ, which is used
only in Castilian (Spanish), but not in
Catalan. Barcelona’s secondbiggest
football club was named “Español” on its
founding in 1900, to distinguish it from
fc Barcelona, whose founder was Swiss.
The club renamed itself Espanyol to
appease local sensitivities in 1995.
In recent weeks language wars have
reached high politics. The same Va
lencian party that insisted on València
also pushed to be allowed to use “Países
Catalanes” (Catalan countries) in the
Senate—a loaded phrase beloved of
separatists, which includes the Valencia
region, Catalonia and the Balearic Is
lands, all of which speak Catalan.
Meanwhile, the Socialistled minority
government needed the support of re
gionalist parties to pass its budget lastweek.Itdidsoinpartbypromisingmore
children’s television in Basque, and by
agreeing to require streaming platforms
based in Spain to offer 6% of their con
tent in Spain’s main minority languages,
Basque, Catalan and Galician. (Details
remain murky. Content dubbed into
those languages will count; subtitles
apparently won’t.)
Rather more seriously, a row over
schooling now threatens a constitutional
conflict. Catalonia’s immersion model
has generally required all subjects to be
taught in Catalan, except Spanish itself.
This annoys families from elsewhere in
Spain. But on November 23rd Spain’s
supreme court ruled that 25% of courses
must be in Spanish—and the Catalan
government’s education boss immedi
ately told schools that there should be
“no change” in practice. The national
government stayed calm, saying the
Catalans should respect the courts. The
leader of the main opposition party,
Pablo Casado, said that if they did not,
the Senate should revoke Catalonia’s
right to set its own education policy.
Many ordinary people in Spain are
happily bilingual in Spanish and a re
gional language. But when dealing with
Spain’s identitarian politicians, whether
in Madrid, Valencia or Barcelona, you
must choose your accents carefully.LanguageinSpainAccenting the negative
M ADRID
Linguistic trivia—and issues not so trivial—reignite Spain’s language wars