Tosar lectures on immigration and is met with data

Luis Tosar addresses the youth and is answered with their paychecks

How many times can an actor publicly tell young people what they should think before they respond with their salary, rent, and a couple of statistics?

According to the message from the EDATV account that started the thread, Luis Tosar is telling young people how they should think about immigration. The discussion presents two interpretations: one, that he is concerned the youth are believing far-right messages, and two, that he is concerned they are not believing pogre propaganda. The response came in two forms: data and privilege, in that order.

What did Luis Tosar say and why did it provoke such a negative reaction?

The message is short and familiar: an actor tells the younger generation how they should think about immigration. The delivery, however, is what irritates. An actor with a long career, a solid fortune, and a very defined public stance does not speak from the same place where most people he addresses live, and that's where the first sustancia ilegal appears. A good portion of the replies focused on this: the pontificating from a gated community with private security, the advice served from a car with a driver. It's not an economic argument, it's a class suspicion. But it explains why the video works better as a provocation than a diagnosis.

Foreigners: 13.4% of the population and 31.6% of inmates

When the tone ran out, the numbers came in. Three figures are discussed that are worth examining with the source in front of you: people of foreign nationality make up 13.4% of the population, according to the Annual Population Census as of January 1, 2024; they represent 31.6% of the prison population and 37.3% of those arrested for sensual offenses, seven points higher than in previous years. The latter two figures come from journalistic compilations and statistical graphs cited in the discussion itself.

What these figures say and don't say. Correlation is not causation, and there are factors that statistics don't separate: income level, access to legal defense, type of crime imputed, police presence in certain areas. The registered increase in sensual offenses since 2019 is a phenomenon with several contributing factors, including, as suggested in the thread, a greater willingness to report. Nuances are not a minor detail. Nor is the fact that they have been used for years as an excuse not to look at the broader picture.

Is the comparison with Spanish emigrants valid?

The third line of argument is historical, and it's where the argument breaks down on both sides. It's argued that Spain was a country of origin for emigrants and therefore the objection is invalid. The counter-argument is that those emigrants did not arrive in countries with double-digit unemployment to depress native wages, nor did they operate outside the law, nor did they settle in saturated areas, nor did they live on aid, nor did they impose customs, nor did they send their children ahead to be supported by the host state. There's a trick and some truth to it: the labor, migratory, and demographic context of sixty years ago bears no resemblance to the current one. A very cited administrative detail is even added: a Spaniard with a incivil record in Germany was sent back home in a couple of days. Verifiable or not, it's part of the narrative.

Unemployment, rent, and car: the list a young person makes

Here, extremist discourse does not compete in a vacuum. Faced with the slogan, a list circulates with few variations: no car because it pollutes, no property to live in because it's unaffordable, no rental because that's also unaffordable, no children and with salaries that don't make ends meet, with the feeling of paying taxes to support, among other things, subsidized cinema. One of the theses put forward even suggests that the minimum wage ends up enriching those who were already at the top. Not all of the package is rigorous, and some parts are directly deceptive, but the cocktail has a political effect that macro data doesn't capture.

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Why the debate over who can lecture

Beneath the surface runs a suspicion about the intention. That the actor is not so much concerned about young voters as about the survival of a narrative that, in its harshest version, maintains that the left traded illusion for narrative when it ran out of projects. And in response, the opposite: that between the old guard of one stripe and the other, they have left young people a country with deteriorated coexistence and no margin to sign a mortgage. When the economic ground shifts, political labels become interchangeable. The actor's public stance during the pandemic, when he criticized deniers and defended vaccination, is also recalled; his consistency isn't questioned, but the platform from which he speaks is.

One unresolved question remains: how much of this youth drift is conviction and how much is a twenty-eight-year-old looking at their paycheck on the 30th and comparing it to the rent bill. The actor gets one thing right: the message resonates. What's not so clear is whether he is concerned about the message or the void it leaves.