Free-D

Salamanca seems star struck at the moment, what with the recent royal visit and that of Forest Whittaker and co.  There are, however, other visitors that don’t seem as welcome. You may have noticed that the local press prints something almost every week about the rising level of immigrants and foreigners. Normally such articles aren’t overtly negative, but the constant presence of graphs and pie charts demonstrating the ever decreasing percentage of Castellanos in Salamanca is sufficient to create a sense of unease in the most liberal of Salmantinos. Of course immigration is a complex issue; it’s just our responses to it that sink into caricature. Not that I’ve personally experienced any negative aspects to being a foreigner here.

Or should that be “English foreigner”; because obviously not all visitors are created equal. I’ve been dragged into numerous conversations where half way through a tirade aimed at immigrants, someone turns to me and says “not you, you’re different”. I suppose the way I’m different is that, speaking English and being from a middle (ish) class background, it’s been fairly easy to establish myself. In other words –- the difference of sheer luck. The biggest gripe amongst Salmantinos seems to be against Rumanians, who bring with them an oddly criminal culture. For us liberals it can be deeply uncomfortable getting into a conversation about race and immigration with locals. In general the Spanish seem much less afraid of causing offence than we do in England. But prejudice isn’t simply defined by how we express ourselves; many racist people manage to adopt a convincingly liberal syntax, just as there are some who aren’t racists but whose ignorance of convention causes offence. It seems likely that the immigrant Rumanian population will integrate slowly into their new home: whether they do so as a largely criminal class depends essentially on how we respond to them. It’s useless to deny that they pose a problem, but it’s even more damaging to assume that they always will do. Such attitudes have the quality of a self fulfilling prophecy. Anybody who has spent any time at the comisaria attempting to gain some kind of official place in Spanish society will understand how lost and unhappy most immigrants are.

Not caring for this “human” picture, statistics attempts to give us a “neutral” view by the use of “scientific” styles of presentation: the pie chart, the graph and the spreadsheet. Data, however, does nothing to bring us any closer to understanding      people or their problems.