We brought them

We brought them on ourselves: you, me, the infamous Spanish political class, and all those who for decades, despite the signs, examples, and warnings, have preferred to shrug and look the other way. Now, despite what the demagogues and opportunists on duty maintain, there's no one to fix it. The problem came to Spain to stay. For other countries with more efficiency, more organization, and more common sense than ours, the matter is slipping away or has gotten out of hand; so we can all get used to it. The only sad consolation will be this: we pay and will continue to pay our own bills. Those of our stupidity, our lack of foresight, and our selfishness.

Some arrived naturally, when this country of university graduates began to find itself without plumbers, carpenters, or bricklayers; with few people working under the plastic of a greenhouse in Almería, nor with 40 degrees in a melon field in Murcia, nor on a construction site, nor on a fishing boat, nor in anything that required working hard. We imported all that cheap labor without hesitation and made money from it, just as Spanish-American emigration came to cover other needs and to enrich, or at least give life to, many large and small business owners. The thing is that unlike the latter, with which we share a language and certain values of those formerly called Western, the latter, the Muslim one, was more difficult to integrate, since Islam is a powerful way of life that transcends religion to also become a rigid social dictate. Even then, there were those—allow me to include myself among them, for I paid the price for doing so—who, out of common sense or travel experience, warned of the long-term consequences that this could have if it was not addressed in a reasonable manner, seeking—or demanding, in extreme cases—appropriate social integration, respect for the rules, and pointing the door when they were violated.

Nothing was done, of course. Any call to impose clear rules that wouldn't regress our world of rights and freedoms to the Middle Ages was dismissed as xenophobia and racism by the usual team of idiots. Media outlets of various stripes, in tune with the climate, spent a lot of time sugarcoating problems, obscuring details, filtering any sign of a disturbing future through the sieve of political correctness. And this was accentuated in the following stage, when the children of that first generation of Muslim immigrants who settled in Spain began to find that they had it even harder than their parents: no jobs, no resources, no social recognition, their paths to integration even more blocked by the almost absolute—I repeat, almost absolute—incompatibility of their family values, cultural and religious references, with the modern, advanced, and free society in which they lived.

Added to this perfectly understandable social resentment was the blind policy of the Spanish educational authorities, incapable of integrating these young people into a world of European values that, after centuries of struggle and sacrifice, had managed to eradicate the same or similar reactionary, sexist, religious customs that these young people followed and continue to imbibe, both at home and in the mosque or in their social environment, especially because they find in them support, solace, companionship, pride, dignity, and that warm fraternal and familial affection so common among Muslims, which is inherent to their culture. And so, entire neighborhoods with immigrant populations are closing in on themselves, and those places where women once enjoyed greater or relative freedom now find themselves, as a reaction and a display of their own identity, under the surveillance of increasingly radical imams and neighbors, filled with hijabs, niqabs, and even burqas. While the State, instead of adopting measures to protect this Muslim population from fanaticism and coercion, leaves them defenseless against their own extremes, condemning them to submission with no alternatives; tolerating practices that denigrate the condition of women, embolden Islamic machismo, encourage hostility and contempt toward non-Muslims, and offend reason.

This has been the case, and is increasingly the case. For a long time, instead of recognizing the scale of the problem by observing what was happening in other nearby countries like France—where the majority of the Muslim community identifies as Algerian or Moroccan rather than French—in Spain, the ostrich-sided policy was maintained, engaging in stupid debates about the use of the veil in schools (even by teachers, who are the ones who educate them), giving free rein, except in glaring cases, to radical imams in mosques, and pretending not to hear or see the applause and flag-waving of young Muslims celebrating the barbarity of ISIS or Hamas's attacks against Israel. All of this, naturally, with the public support of certain self-proclaimed progressive—even feminist!—social movements that never had the slightest idea of what radical Islam really is, nor of its rejection of the European way of life. towards the hard-won freedom that he enjoys, being able to be an adulteress without being stoned, blaspheme without being burned, or be homosexual without being hung from a crane.

But it doesn't end there. The problem of young second-generation Muslims born or settled in Spain as children has been compounded in recent decades by the massive illegal immigration: the massive arrivals that have brought hundreds, thousands, of people to Spanish towns and cities who don't even have the ties to this new world they move in, as those who, for work and family reasons, have been here for so long. For many newcomers, tough people who sometimes suffered greatly to get here, Spain, like the rest of Europe, is a foreign, hostile, often weak territory, with which they have no emotional connection. A place to thrive and plunder, with work—if there is any, which is another matter—or with easy and immediate methods: violence, self-marginalization, crime. Grouped into survivalist and attack gangs—there are already radical organizations that advocate rejecting the host country—sympathetic to one another, as Muslims that they are, in the face of these sullen and racist Spaniards, yet so stupid, in their opinion, as to allow them to roam free and even benefit from aid, healthcare systems, and other benefits. Come here, Mohamed, cousin, because in Spain you can occupy someone else's house, call a bitch in a miniskirt a whore, rob at knifepoint, and the next day, if they catch you, you're on the street. And if you're a minor, why bother telling you? Besides, they subsidize you. Why go hungry, if it's nighttime and there are fig trees?

Thus, in Spain, we have achieved a sinister double whammy: uncontrolled immigration, with the creation of racial, cultural, social, and religious ghettos that reject integration and are increasingly active and hostile, and the growing anger of those who suffer from this, including disadvantaged Spaniards who think—and often find out—that a newcomer, oblivious to everything, receives more attention and more aid than they do. The result is two extremes rubbing their hands together: the illiterate left, delighted to side with any real or invented victim, with a lot of kufiya around their necks and a lot of "Sister, your veil is an act of freedom," and the right, searching for arguments to justify the clatter of boots and the stick and the flailing. And while those idiots maintain that the solution is to legalize everyone at once, those who have arrived and those yet to arrive, these other idiots claim that the solution is to expel thousands or millions indiscriminately, without specifying how, or how, or where. And please spare me that "Instead of so much criticism, we must provide solutions." My job is not to provide solutions, but to tell the world as I see it. And what I see, perhaps because I'm 73 years old, have a library, and a certain biography behind me, is that there are things that have no solution. There was one at one time: either you enjoy our respect and sympathy if you play by our rules and live in a way that is compatible with our customs—there's a reason you came here fleeing the customs of your country of origin—or you face the consequences, which are the law in all its rigor and the departure lounge of an airport.

What I just said—firmness, mutual tolerance, and respect for our shared space—was still possible a few years ago; but now it's too late. So, I fear, everything will escalate, sparking new conflicts, because the social resentment I spoke of earlier ends up turning not on those truly responsible—the inept politicians incapable of preventing and solving the problem—but on the Muslim community indiscriminately, mixing the righteous with the sinners, targeting immigrants, regardless of their generation, who work honestly, who have their small or reasonable business, who pay their taxes, earn a decent living, and contribute to making their town, their city, Spain, and the Europe in which they live better, more prosperous, and livable places. And when demagogues and scoundrels who get paid to stir up other people's passions use immigration and the problems it entails as a political weapon, those who pay the price for their folly aren't usually the bad guys, but the honest people whose shops they burn, whose cars they smash, who are beaten if they find them defenseless on the street. And in the end, inevitably, those people, or the children of those people, will end up forming their own defense groups to settle the score. And neighborhoods and cities will burn, as has already happened elsewhere in Europe, in increasingly intense outbreaks from which, pardon the term, we haven't learned a damn thing.

But, as I say, we brought them here: all of them, some of them, and others, with our selfishness, our lack of foresight, our cowardice, our ignorance, and our incompetence. We and the rabble we voted for, continue to vote, and will vote in the future. So there you have it: what we have and what we're going to have.