Álvaro Vega I Córdoba, (EFE) that “of every ten people born in the world today (only) one is white.”
In ‘My neighbor is black: The challenges of diversity’ (Ánfora Nova, 2023), García-Calabrés (Priego de Córdoba, 1955), exposes that it is an irreversible process as there are billions of immigrants.
3.6% of the world population has migrated internationally. About 300 million people have migrated out of their countries. And 750 million have done so within their own countries, according to the data offered in the work.
In an interview with EFE, the author, a professor at the University of Córdoba for ten years and who has taught at Loyola Andalucía for seven years, stated that “we are moving towards this reality due to migratory pressure. Due to the need for labor, due to the lack of birth rates”.
Manage through interculturality
It is a situation that he believes must be managed through “interculturality”. And for what there is, he has stressed, “an entire design of inclusion policy because it is a reality that is coming to us.”
Among the instruments that he cites in the book are what is included in the 2030 Agenda, the Agenda 21-27 of inclusion of the European Union. And, previously, the right to interculturality approved by the Tunis Forum in 2013.
In any case, he has been in favor of “also incorporating the right to intercultural coexistence into the catalog of rights.” From the point of view of the “evolutionary character” of the fundamental rights approved in 1948. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations, likewise, perhaps, has specified that “then there was no Internet and today we would have a right of access presumably to networks and computer media”.
Community of rights and obligations
García-Calabrés, linked to the world of immigration since 1993 through Córdoba Acoge and the Immigration Law Commission of the Córdoba Bar Association, has opted to “give political rights”. And “build a community of rights and obligations, but in terms of equality” with immigration.
Thus, he has revealed the inconsistency that, in his opinion, means that in the last municipal elections “only the European population registered in Spain could vote.” While “a Moroccan man who has lived in Spain for thirty years who has three children, three businesses and pays his taxes, he cannot vote in the Spanish elections. Neither in autonomic, nor in municipal and in general”.
At the same time, he has opted for “working that discourse against fear, against hoaxes, against xenophobia.” And, in fact, he dedicates a space in his book “to deny ten popular hoaxes”, with data. Like the fact that the Chinese do not pay taxes, that immigration does not contribute to the economy. That foreigners should come “all with contracts like we went abroad. Which is false because in Switzerland there were 300,000 Spaniards who were there without a contract. And in Germany there were 900,000 Spaniards without a contract”, or that foreigners take our jobs.
In fact, he exposes in his work that 3.1% of the working population in Europe is deserted. In other words, “it needs foreign labor”, which in the case of Germany means the need for 200,000 people. And that “there are already plans to incorporate 500,000 people a year into Canada as foreign workers.”
The reception, in the Spanish DNA
In his opinion, welcoming is “in the DNA of Spanish culture and society. Because we have done it for centuries with the cultures that have come, because when we have gone abroad we have mixed where we have been”.
In addition, he believes it is necessary “to take advantage of the singularities, because here we do not have the administrative centralization of assimilationism” but rather “the peculiarities of the autonomous communities, the studies and the social policies for each territory, which is much more permeable, more flexible” to the time of integration.
In any case, he has recognized that “it is true that there are some very identity, very nationalist, very localist reactions that are against the European Union, against globalization, of what McLuhan, the American sociologist, fifty years ago, It was coined as the global village, but they are irreversible phenomena and coexistence depends on it”. EFE