Illustration: Marc Pallarès
Last fall, Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev explained in a conference at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) that the countries in Europe where xenophobia is strongest are not precisely those that have received the most refugees. On the contrary, the distrust towards foreigners awoken by the Syrian exodus is much more pronounced in the parts of Europe that have lost the most population over the past 25 years. “People who leave their country devaluate and discredit their place of origin. Those who stay behind are often considered losers, and they live with the feeling that they no longer understand the place where they live”, Krastev observed.
Barcelona is one of the cities in Europe that has been the most understanding of the drama of the refugees, and it has also been a magnet for immigration in southern Europe. The communities of people from abroad living in Barcelona today are bigger and more diverse than ever.
In this dossier, we dedicate a space to investigating, on the one hand, how our largest immigrant communities live: Italians, Chinese, Moroccans, Pakistanis and Latin Americans. On the other hand, we look at how nationalities that have not been very well-represented until now have made themselves more visible, like the Bengalis, Armenians or Hondurans.