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