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Tourism is a drop in the water compared to mass immigration. Catalonia, and Barcelona metro in particular, had a flux of African immigrants who in turn have families with 6 to 10 kids. And insignificant new housing. But they choose to bother tourists because it's cool.

https://www.epdata.es/evolucion-emigracion-inmigracion-comun...



From your source: Cataluña, Población 7.710.136 personas, Emigrantes 61.597 personas, Inmigrantes 102.420 personas - https://www.epdata.es/datos/poblacion-inmigrantes-emigrantes...

"The most-visited region of Spain was Catalonia, with 18 million foreign visitors. Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia." "The coastal city alone, with its many internationally famous sites such as La Sagrada Familia, received more than 12 million tourists last year." https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-09/why-are-people-protes...

40K net immigration/year is much smaller than 18 million.

Even if those 18 million are in Catalonia for only a day, that's still 49K people.


Tourists typically stay one week. Inmigrants stay forever and accumulate.


Show your work please.

Tourism in Catalonia has increased a lot over the last couple of decades.

"1,159,905 tourists/persons stayed at hotels in Catalonia in 2023 according the Spanish Statistics Institute (INE). This is 6.98% over 2022 figures 1,085,088, and 2.4% over 2019 figures 1,132,586 persons." says https://www.barcelonayellow.com/barcelona-faq/1197-how-many-... .

Clearly 12 million tourists who visited Barcelona is far more than the 1 million who stayed at hotels in Catalonia, but we'll look at just the hotel numbers.

1,159,905 - 1,085,088 = 74,817

That means an increase by 75K tourists in the last year, compared to a net immigration of 40K.

And that's only those at hotels. Even if the tourism population increases by only 1% each year that's still 120K additional people per year, which is 3x that of the net immigration change, and still larger than the total number of new immigrants.

Where did the other tourists stay? Clearly AirB&B, which competes with local housing, but some also came by cruise ship, which does not.

Also, I strongly suspect "Emigrantes" and "Inmigrantes" refers to people moving in and out of Catalonia, which would include people moving there from Madrid. Your source didn't give the number of immigrants specifically from Africa.

However the numbers they do give show there is no way the number of African immigrants, including their Spanish born children, are enough to make the increasing number of tourists each year in Catalonia be "a drop in the water" by comparison.


Tourism impacts housing by converting them to expensive rentals.


And immigrants impact housing by renting them thus increasing demand.


And Italians (40K), followed by Pakistani (23K), Chinese (22K), and French (17K), are the top immigrant nations to Barcelona before finally getting to Moroccans (16K), which is the only African nation in the top 11 listed at https://www.barcelona.cat/metropolis/es/contenidos/demografi... .

All population information I can find says your seemingly racist viewpoint is not backed by any evidence that it's a significant contribution.


Did I say or imply anything about the race of the immigrants?!


"a flux of African immigrants who in turn have families with 6 to 10 kids. And insignificant new housing. But they choose to bother tourists because it's cool."

Would you have preferred "xenophobic", "nativist", or "bigoted" instead?

No non-Moroccan African countries were even on that list of immigrant populations in Catalonia.

I checked with https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racismo_cultural and indeed even in Spanish "racism" does not specifically require "race":

> El racismo cultural, también denominado «neoracismo» o «racismo diferencial», es una forma de racismo surgida después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial en la que la identificación de los grupos humanos no se basa en sus rasgos biológicos (en la «raza», un concepto deslegitimado después de 1945) sino en su cultura, estableciendo una jerarquía de culturas «superiores» e «inferiores» como en el viejo racismo científico.


Check out the user author of those comments. You are replying to a different person. I did not write those words.


Indeed.

So why are you making irrelevant comments which imply you support a racist?


Because immigration does impact housing, no matter the races involved. The questions is: why are you bringing race into this?


Because I was responding to a specific racist claim that certain African immigrants had a much higher impact on the housing problems in Barcelona than the increase in tourism, supposedly backed by numbers, but in fact empty lies.


Dog whistles are dog whistles buddy.


He’s replying to a different person, I did not write the words he’s quoted.


you defended a comment that did, taking it as your own


Is that how forums on the Internet work?


I'm not familiar with the laws there, but In England if my friends went around spraying immigrants with water pistols and saying "go home" we would have our lives ruined. Could that be a factor?




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