As if the price the country paid for its ridiculous colonial efforts on North Africa weren’t high enough, Spain stubbornly holds on to Ceuta and Melilla, its last two enclaves in North Africa.
Something very disturbing took place in the poorest neighborhoods of Melilla the other day. The unemployment rate in these barrios stands somewhere between 47%-50%. Every year, the authorities publish a list of people who are given 6-month-long jobs by the government. These jobs pay €1,000 and require no qualifications. The lucky few whose names get on to the list get to clean public areas, tend the gardens belonging to the municipality, and so on.
After it was announced that new regulations had been passed and now only those who had resided in the city for at least 2 years would get a chance to appear on the list, the neighborhoods inhabited by many recent and illegal immigrants erupted in violence. A group of about 60 unemployed barricaded one of the streets and violently resisted attempts by the police to remove the barricade.
The official name of the barrio where the disturbances took place is La Cañada de Hidum. It has long been known, however, as La Cañada de la Muerte (the Valley of Death.) The people populating the neighborhood are illiterate and lack any kind of job skills. This makes their employment opportunities limited to the menial, low-paid, scarce jobs that only allow to keep surviving in the barrio without  any hopes of leaving it. Aside from the 6-month jobs offered by the municipal authorities once a year, people in the Valley of Death manage to scrape by selling drugs, exploiting the even more marginalized and dispossessed immigrants from the Sahara, and engaging in petty crime.
It is easy to overlook what is happening in faraway Melilla, a place that is marginal both to Spain and North Africa. I believe, however, that we need to be paying attention to the events in Melilla. The chasm between the educated who have the whole world open to them and the illiterate who are forever stuck in the barrio is growing. The reality where one could carve out a decent living with a low-skill blue-collar job does not exist any longer.
We live in the world where there is a soaring number of people whose skills and time are so precious that they hire career management services, employ life coaches, attend networking events, participate in mentorship programs, download endless productivity apps, and schedule their lives in 10-minute increments. At the same time, the gulf between such people and the functionally illiterate / unskilled is widening. There used to be a middle-ground between these two classes but it is disappearing.
This is a major societal transformation that we are witnessing. La Cañada de Hidum, a miserable, hopeless slum, filled with confused, angry people, is coming to your town soon, too. Something really major needs to be done to make sure that the majority of the population doesn’t end up in this dead-end barrio. In order to do that, we need to stop looking backwards and sighing for how things used to be 20, 30, 50 years ago. That time is gone, and there is no going back. The technological revolution(s) of the second half of the XXth century are leaving many people behind. Remember what happened during the Industrial Revolution of the XIXth century when the agricultural societies were destroyed? What is happening today is very similar.
Nobody made any efforts to soften the blow of the inevitable (and ultimately wonderful and absolutely necessary) Industrial Revolution for those whom it was hurting the most. As a result, we all ended up with two world wars and several bloody totalitarian regimes on our hands.
Isn’t it time to learn from the past and ensure that the Technological Revolution costs the humanity less than the Industrial Revolution did?