Birth-rate, family, ageing, immigration, integration

BY coincidence, two days later President Rodríguez Zapatero announced that from that henceforth all families with new-borns  would be entitled to receive a one-off payout of  2,500 euros. The next day, the president himself stated almost naively: “The truth is Spain needs children”. And he added: “And we have spent thirty years doing nothing about it”.

Clearly this decision smacks of electioneering. And possibly those who criticise him on technical grounds – such as the minister Solbes– are right. And it remains to be seen whether, once again, measures that are good in themselves will be used to curtail Catalonia’s powers, which has already happened to the Disability law.

But it does go in the right direction. Now is the time to begin to amend a policy and an ideology that has ignored, even discussed with disdain, the family and the birth-rate.

The attitude towards this issue has been all too frivolous. But all Europe has understood – even with the fear of being too late–  the following points:

1. The low birth-rate entails demographic decadence and collective loss of future ambition.

2. The lengthening of life produces a significant ageing population.

3. These two facts, together with the imbalance of population and of wealth in the world, give rise to mass immigration.

4. The best response to immigration is a policy of fair and balanced integration, based on the rights and obligations of the immigrants and the host country.

To all of this, Europe today adds another key objective: supporting the family,  that is, the family support policy. All sorts of families – all to be respected– but with a marked preference for the family made up of father, mother and offspring, which deserves financial support, social consideration and trust. At the same time, it also seeks to make parents remember their inalienable duty to educate their children.

(Regarding the issue of the family, see the editorial “The other infrastructures”.)

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For many years the discussion of this issue has been something of a taboo in Catalonia. And to speak in favour of the integration of immigrants. Fear of being branded intransigent, right wing, reactionary. But if reactionary implies going against progress and against everything that is in society’s interest and has a bearing on the future, the reactionary is he who does not speak about it, or continues to defend positions that have been in vogue for several decades but that are now outdated.

Gordon Brown, for example, has understood this. He has had to redesign the Government and set up three new ministries. The first, Innovation, Universities and Skills – note the term skill. The second, Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform – reform here means debureaucratisation. And the third ministry is called Children, Schools, and Families. And children are spoken of with a touch of naivety that would make some here laugh condescendingly. Because precisely the opposite has been done here: the Department of Welfare and Family has been tuned into Social Action and Citizens’ Rights. It is very good to speak of citizens’ rights. But it is widely accepted now that the root of many difficulties of schooling and of cohabitation itself originates in the family. Europe has changed course. In Catalonia some continue to move like crabs.