BOGEYMEN

At the tail end of last year, my daughter and I decided to watch a rom-com called ’Two Weeks Notice’ (2002), starring Hugh Grant, who played his usual hughgrant role (posh English accent, raised eyebrows, twitchy mouth) and Sandra Bullock, who made an effort to be funny and sometimes was. Grant’s character is a major property developer in New York and his rival is Donald Trump, who actually appears in an eye-blinkingly short cameo in which he still manages to convey all of his ghastly pomposity (as well as his total inability to act). We were stunned, not least because he looked pretty much like he does today, when we know that he is an outrageous liar, a phenomenal ignoramus and the perpetrator of what amounted to a coup d’état in the world’s most heavily-armed democracy. But Trump’s most dangerous characteristic is almost certainly his attitude towards immigration. Right from the get-go, Trump was laying into Mexican incomers as rapists, not to mention people from ’shithole countries’. In September of last year he notched his rhetoric up to full eugenics-based racism, saying that immigrants were ’poisoning the blood of our country’. Less well-known is his earlier insistence to the Department of Homeland Security that a two thousand mile moat be built along the Mexican border filled with ’snakes and alligators’ to eat any aspiring immigrants alive. And his xenophobic belly-aching would seem to have set an international precedent, at least in Europe: the UK, which accepts far less immigrants than many EU countries, is still trying to turn boats full of desperate people away from its green and not so pleasant land, and last December even deported a man who had been born in England, to his parents’ country (Portugal) even though he had never been there and didn’t speak the language. To get into Hungary, Slovakia, Denmark and Poland foreigners have to jump through a near-impossible number of bureaucratic hoops; in the Netherlands, the far-right politician Geert Wilders scored an electoral victory by playing the anti-immigration card for all it was worth; in France, Macron’s new immigration restrictions have been praised and backed by Marine Le Pen… And yet, it is precisely these countries that have some of the lowest percentages of immigrants (1 immigrant to 1,000 in Slovakia; 5/1,000 in France; only 2% of the Hungarian population are immigrants, 5% in Poland, 8% in Denmark; 11% in the Netherlands). Back in 2016, I attended the largest pro-immigration demo in the whole of Europe: it took place in Barcelona, the capital of a country in which 21% of the population are immigrants from abroad. This is not to say that Catalonia is free of racism (we’ve all met the usual idiots) but the general atmosphere here certainly seems to be less hostile to newcomers, perhaps due to certain historical factors which have taught many Catalans that immigrants are not the amorphous mass of devious bogeymen most right-wing European politicians present them as; to start with, over 80% of Catalans today are descendants of immigrants themselves, ranging from the vast wave of French immigration in the 17th century, to the mid-20th century internal migration from other parts of the peninsula (one and a half million people over a 10-year period) and the children of the more recent Latin American, African and North African arrivals. Catalonia isn’t a paradise for immigrants, of course, but it isn’t a hell either. At least when compared to so many other countries that define themselves as ’civilised’, without checking the dictionary definition: ’at an advanced stage of social and political development’.

Opinion