La gestión de la interculturalidad en tiempos de crisis: El discurso de los técnicos municipales en Cataluña

Abstract

This work analyzes the discourse of front-desk immigration policy makers at the local level on the impact of the economic crisis and the denominated «adjustment policies» on the changes in migrant's demand and management of the same policies. This happens in a specific context -the Catalan one- which has adopted an Interculturality discourse as a normative discourse. To do this, we analyzed a set of personal interviews with 20 frontdesk local policy makers in the immigration area and 10 politicians also responsible for immigration issues within their municipalities. Municipalities were selected according to a previous typology based on the presence or not of residential enclaves, the segregation level and the population size. Interviewee's discourse allow us to outline the complexity of relationships that the policy manager's perceive between their own work and the migrant population, in a context of economic recession and under the influx of a changing political discourse.