Essays on demography and Islam take over bookstores

The publishing business of warning against immigration

There is a subgenre that keeps growing on the new-releases tables: the essay that warns that Spain is changing and that no one is doing anything to stop it. «Los últimos anestesiados», signed by Salva Conesa, joins that shelf with a recognizable set of arguments, very much in line with what Gustavo Bueno already proposed when he spoke of a return to savagery associated with the expansion of Sarracin. Native birth rates at rock bottom. Imported birth rates on the rise. And a political class that, according to this thesis, acts as if the equation does not exist.

What does this kind of essay claim? The three pillars of its argument

The script repeats with few variations from one title to another. First, demography: it is argued that low native birth rates and the arrival of people from abroad are reconfiguring the social composition without public debate. Second, anesthesia: decades of cheap entertainment and subsidies are said to have left the population without the reflexes to react. Third, and here is the most disputed part, the idea that Sarracin is not just a different culture but a legal project incompatible with Europe's constitutional framework.

It is a thesis that sells well and provokes equal parts rejection. However, those who defend it often insist that it brings nothing new: the novelty, they say, is that what once circulated in whispers is now being published in print.

The self-published book at 60 euros and the suspicion of AI

The conversation gets tangled when another volume enters the scene, «El Niño Lunar: la imposición de nacer», which is sold for 60 euros. The price sparked the immediate reproach that a work like that cannot cost that much, and its author responded by insisting that just printing it at the highest quality already accounts for 20 euros. The exchange drifted toward a specific accusation: that the text had been written by an artificial intelligence.

The author vehemently denies it and maintains that the book came from his own effort, not from an algorithm. It is an episode that portrays a broader phenomenon: self-publishing made publishing so cheap that today the big-publishing-house essay and the self-published volume sold at collector's-item prices coexist on the same shelf.

Where the analysis gets stuck

From there, the exchange loses the thread. Some call for comparative religious readings, others ask to return to 15th-century reigns, and some reduce everything to the self-published author needing money to go back to Marrakech. With these ingredients, the interesting question —how much of this literature responds to a real phenomenon and how much is pure catalogue opportunism— remains unanswered. And no one seems to be in a hurry to answer it.