How little we remember foreign children when they don’t score goals for the national team. When they lift a country and move us to tears of joy, however, we transform their origins: there is nothing more Spanish than a Black player wearing the national team shirt who scores those goals in the top corner. Then every investment is worthwhile. We all want to have a Lamine Yamal in the team.
“Almost six thousand boys and girls have become the hot potato that almost nobody wants to pick up”
For the rest, the homeland is much more restrictive. Closed doors, criminalisation and contempt. Let us consider, for example, the Canary Islands or Ceuta. More than five thousand boys and girls in the first and four hundred in the second are in reception centres under conditions of pure survival: shelter and food. “Ninety euros a day,” is said again and again, reducing the price of life to the cost of keeping it. Almost six thousand boys and girls who have become the hot potato that almost nobody wants to pick up. And they are not doing it for three reasons:
The first is simply racism. Let us be clear, the recurring statements of Vox, from some PP presidents and from Junts, which never wants to be left behind, reveal more resistance to skin colour, to prejudice and to preconceived ideas than they do a considered decision.
The second is pure politics: the PP’s stance can only be explained, especially now that Ceuta joins the bidding, if we accept that migrations have become a throwing weapon to whip up the government. The lives of thousands of children on the edge and the discourse of interterritorial solidarity tossed in the rubbish in order to attack Sánchez.
The third and last is myopia or incapacity. I adhere here to the principle of not attributing malice to what can be attributed to stupidity.
“From the bet we now place with them, from the capacity we have not only to meet their basic needs, but to generate training and inclusion mechanisms that help them pursue their life aspirations, will depend not only on their future, but also on the effect they have on our society”
The attitude that all political parties across the spectrum have adopted is that of someone who has to solve a problem. And let us be clear, in the short term there is no doubt that this is true. The issue is that, to the misfortune of all the “statesmen” who overturned the reform of the immigration regulation, the mid-term begins at the same time as the short: all these young people will grow up and, whether the army of haters likes it or not, they will be Spanish citizens just like the rest. From the bet we now place with them, and from our capacity not only to cover their basic needs, but to generate training and inclusion mechanisms that help them pursue their life aspirations, will depend not only their future but also the effect they have on our society. And in a country that needs between 200,000 and 270,000 migrants per year to meet the demands of the labor market, in which more than 148,000 positions remained unfilled in 2023, it is not only morally obligatory to generate opportunities for these children to develop, but economically smart. The extra investment needed to do this is minimal compared with what we must inevitably spend to welcome them. So the choice is simple: we can invest in them so that they become a bright part of our future, or abandon them so that that same future darkens into a self-fulfilling prophecy of mandatory social exclusion.
“The choice is simple: we can invest in them so that they become a bright part of our future, or abandon them so that that same future darkens into a self-fulfilling prophecy of mandatory social exclusion”
We need the political courage to treat the arrival of unaccompanied minors as a fact beyond our control, and to turn necessity into virtue, seizing the opportunity presented in an increasingly aging and inward-looking society. Because to know whether they will become Lamine Yamal or Iñaki Williams, to unleash all that talent and use it as a force for transformation, we need to cultivate them all. The Yamal Plan was not about winning the European Championship. It is a country-building project.
