Catalunya, terra d’acollida: Stateless Nationalist Party Discourses on Immigration in Catalonia

Abstract

In 1987, the Generalitat¹ launched the institutional campaign’ som sis Milions’ (We are six million). It was aimed at expressing the idea that there are no differences between being born in Catalonia or being an immigrant (El Pais, 2009). Today Catalonia has more than 7.5 million inhabitants and most of this increase is due to the arrival of immigrants from third world countries. Even if migration is not a new phenomenon in Catalonia, the diversity of origins and the rapid pace at which it has taken place during the last decades are new (Franco-Guillén, 2011). Furthermore, the management of immigration coincides with the rise of sub-state nationalist movements seeking to advance self-government and their own nation-building projects (Whithol de Wenden and Zapata-Barrero, 2011). This has been acknowledged by the different governments that have ruled the Generalität since the beginning of the migratory process. Efforts have been made to manage what has been mostly described as ‘a challenge’. From public policies to cross-sectional plans, including a National Agreement on Immigration (PNI, 2008) and a Law for the reception of immigrants, we can say that immigration has been monitored by the Catalan government since its very inception (for an overview see, Zapata-Barrero, 2012a). Furthermore, an awareness that certain discourses on immigration can lead to racist and xenophobic attitudes and thus threaten social cohesion has been present in many debates in the Catalan political arena.