The agreement between PSOE and Together to draft a law that yields Immigration skills to Catalonia continues to raise dust. And not only in the political sphere, despite there being no specificities of the scope of this delegation, but also in the police sphere. For this reason, the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande Marlaska, plans to meet this Monday with the National Police unions and try to calm things down.
Last Thursday, a day after the pact was announced, The police commanders have already tried to reduce the unrest within the body, assuring them that it would not affect their powers, but for the unions it was not enough.
The National Police is the body in charge of managing migration in all autonomous communities, with politically important functions such as border control, asylum permits or returns; but they are also in charge of those that have more to do with management, such as the management of Foreigners Internment Centers (CIE) or the issuance of NIE, the identity documents of foreigners.
The unions fear that with the new law they could lose some of these powers, since they could be assumed by the Mossos de Esquadra, and they consider that this would be the “disintegration” of the National Police in Catalonia. Of the 3,000 agents Of the corps currently stationed in this community, half are dedicated to issues related to immigration.
The demands of Junts
The pact between socialists and post-convergents does not detail the powers that the Generalitat of Catalonia should assume in this transfer, since it is more of a “political decision” that must be addressed during the negotiations of the new law, however, Junts is already advancing that their requests will be maximum and that they will require having complete powers.
Among their main requests is control over the “flows“-through the setting of quotas between autonomous communities, but also the expulsion of repeat offenders. A possibility, the latter, that the President of the Government has already ruled out.
Furthermore, specialist lawyers consider that this is a sterile debate, since they assure that only a judge can expel a repeat offender. Neither the Generalitat, nor the Government. The constitutional limits of the transfer are also not clear, since the Magna Carta points out immigration as an exclusive competence of the State and the Statute ruling of 2010 already declared unconstitutional the article that expanded the immigration powers of the Generalitat.
