Last September, the party’s de facto leader, Carles Puigdemont, outlined migration as a concern, stating that Catalonia has “the highest level of immigration in the whole [Iberian] Peninsula, at 16.2 percent” of the total population.
Junts’ secretary-general, Jordi Turull, meanwhile, has appeared to link immigration to crime.
“Not acting against repeat-offender criminals who have been living here, whether it’s for the last two weeks or for eight generations, jeopardizes co-existence and social cohesion,” he told Junts’ executive.
This jars with the approach to foreign arrivals of Junts and other pro-independence parties when the independence question was dominating the political arena. Although Junts’ previous incarnation, Convergència, once took a relatively tough line on immigration, by 2010, when tensions with Madrid were on the rise, that had changed.
“The foreigners living in Catalonia went from being a risk to an opportunity, at least in theory,” as nationalists saw the new arrivals as potential supporters of independence, said journalist and commentator Lola García, of La Vanguardia newspaper.
But now, she said, for some nationalists, “immigration has gone back to being a risk for Catalan culture rather than an opportunity.”