The regularization of migrant people approved by the Government takes up a good part of the public debate. One of the most relevant social measures of the legislature and which has not been without controversy, both due to the reluctance of the right and the exclusion of stateless persons. In an interview with Demócrata, the deputy of Sumar (Más Madrid), Tesh Sidi, assesses the impact of the regularization, also focusing on its shadows.
From the situation of stateless Sahrawis to tensions within the Executive, also including the housing crisis, digitalization, and international policy, Tesh Sidi draws a critical diagnosis of the legislature and its pending challenges.
MIGRANT REGULARIZATION
Question: The regularization of migrants is already underway. You have fought hard for it and I understand that you consider it good news, but in recent days a stain has been detected, an aspect to improve: the situation of stateless persons.
Answer: The regularization of migrants in our country or in any country is always extraordinary news. I remember when we were carrying the signature collection form, back then I didn't even have Spanish nationality. It is one of the reasons that brought me to institutional politics, the rights of migrants. We do not face a bureaucratic reality for being Spanish nationals, but if you are not registered, you cannot have social security, you cannot even go to the emergency room. It is key, I have been there and I see it as a personal achievement and of all the groups that have articulated the strategy and taken it to Congress, it is an example of citizen power. And of course, thank my party, Más Madrid, and Sumar, who were negotiating within the Government. It is one of the great measures we are taking away from this legislature.
What we didn't know, or what Tesh in 2020 didn't know when collecting signatures, is that this Regulation would carry fine print, leaving out Sahrawi women, my people. All people have the right to regularize their situation and not expel them to marginalization, to slavery. I know this word sounds crazy, but I know what it's like to be paid under the table and not be able to fight for 3.50 euros in a bar compared to 2.50 euros in the Rajoy era. That right is given by a NIE, it's given by a DNI. Otherwise, you are in a regime of slavery, not as we conceive it in the last century, but it is still marginalization.
The Sahrawi stateless people have been left out due to a political decision by the PSOE. It is not a coincidence. It is not a coincidence.
Q: When do you find out about this exclusion?
A: I saw the Regulation on February 6 and I received that exclusion through the Sahrawi Lawyers. All my alarms went off and I said, 'it can't be, it can't be that the PSOE itself in political terms is so clumsy'. By leaving out stateless people, you are devaluing the work of those groups and those people.
"When I saw that they excluded the Sahrawis I said ‘the PSOE cannot be so clumsy’"
Q: I understand that, right now, this point is among your political priorities. Have you spoken with the PSOE to address it? Have they been open or are they showing reluctance?
A: I believe that thanks to our space we will manage to bend them with legal mechanisms, but not with their political will. We are studying avenues within the framework of statelessness itself. We understand that since asylum seekers are going to go to the other extraordinary regime, statelessness itself would somehow be accelerated. The most important thing for people seeking any regularization process is to be able to work.
I don't like to specify it about myself, but I went 10 years without being able to see my family, not even my mother, because of the stateless status, because you can't leave the country. My sisters got married, my nephews were born… Life happens while you regularize your situation.
The same happens with the homologation of degrees. If you are not regularized, you can be an engineer or a doctor like my brothers, you won't be able to apply. We are losing human capital and knowledge from immigrants that would represent a 1% improvement in GDP, if we speak in racist and economistic terms.
"We are losing human and knowledge capital from immigrants that would represent a 1% improvement in GDP"
Q: This vision you paint contrasts with an issue that has occurred in parallel: the “national priority” that PP and Vox have agreed upon in Extremadura and Aragon.
A: What I see is not that there are right-wing parties, but that there is Vox. Vox leads and the PP and its policies are disintegrating little by little. I always give an example. A Spanish family took me in, people with houses, and you could disagree about certain things. Now, if you disagree with them [with the right-wing parties], you are no longer considered human.
It's just that when I interact with the PP or Vox, I have to justify my existence as a human being. We are not talking about economic disagreements, they are attacking conventions, institutions, and what guarantees what they call civilization. If these theses are bought by the supposed moderate right... In Andalusia, the same thing will happen. If Moreno Bonilla does not have a majority, he will have to put the concept of "national priority" in Article 1 of the agreement, that is from Nazi national socialism.
"When I interact with the PP or Vox, I have to justify my existence as a human being. The 'national priority' is from Nazi national socialism"
When Vox entered institutions, we had to listen to socialists' justifications saying that 'they are just racists', as if that were not serious. Now, they are persecuting the LGTBI collective, women... Fascism is going after all collectives and no one will be saved because they serve elites who are not in Spain, they are in Florida. They position themselves with Trump and Netanyahu. They do not defend the patriotism of housing, nor that of feminism, nor that of love. We have seen an absolute change. That "national priority" worries me.
HOUSING
Q: Changing the subject, you just mentioned the housing crisis. You are the spokesperson on the Housing Commission. Sánchez said at the time, back in 2023, that this would be the legislature of housing. The State Plan has recently been approved, but the feeling on the street is that the measures are not arriving. If the legislature ends tomorrow, would Sumar be satisfied with the progress made in this field?
A: The Sumar coalition would be happy with the fight we have put up hand in hand with the unions for housing. It is the matrix of a progressive Government. It is that if a congresswoman cannot even save for a down payment on a mortgage, tell that to a family. We are no longer talking about owners, we are talking about rent, where we are already at levels of co-housing, co-living, of elderly people who are being kicked out of their homes and of dismantling homes like one dismantles a car to sell it for parts more expensive than the whole.
We fight the battle, but we know what our strength is and that that ministry is not ours. Through Bustinduy we have fought the sanctioning regime to pursue tourist apartments, a big loophole that remained in the Housing Law. Also with this extension of rents. But it is not enough.
The minister [Isabel Rodríguez] makes proposals in favor of the owners, but not of the five-story grandma, we are talking about large holders. The PSOE is trying to divert focus in the trap of building more. More can be built, but we will see that in five or ten years. Housing is the Government's big assignment. What's the use of the PSOE being happy about the SMI increase if the Minister of Housing doesn't put a stop to vulture funds and leaves us alone defending the extension with the rent decree.
Q: Sumar does not have Housing, but it has other ministries and they are also not able to pass certain laws. Mónica García's health laws, Urtasun's Cinema law… Do you think the PSOE is being disloyal in part by blocking some of them, or does it respond more to a fragmented Congress? What is your interpretation of their time in government?
A: The PSOE is a hegemonic party that is heir to bipartisanship and must be pushed to look to the left. It caters to elites, in this case [housing] from rentism. I always refer to a phrase Anguita used, which is 'love me less and vote for me more'. The reality is that the left has never fully governed and we have a force of five ministries. There will be those who say we should abandon positions of power, but that is what interests them, bipartisanship, to govern alone. Our time in government has given us knowledge and allowed us to learn mechanisms.
The left cannot lose honesty and the power of the street. We have to explain how this works and there is parliamentary complexity. One of our mistakes is having said that it is a progressive investiture bloc, which the PSOE said, not us, but we should have distanced ourselves. We are clear that there is a plurinational investiture majority, but the measures… The PP does not stop voting with Puigdemont, and those that do not, with the PSOE.
There is also a second derivative, which is autonomic complexity. We are a plurinational State and so it must be. The autonomies have more legislative capacity on housing than the State itself, and the same in health matters.
And then, it bothers me that many of the things we achieved are blurred by the corruption cases that have emerged from the PSOE. We achieved the arms embargo and the Cerdán case broke.
We pushed for the recognition of the State of Palestine to be signed, this royal decree-law on housing, the universality of Public Healthcare, we are fighting for the reduction of the working day, mental health, the green agenda… That did not come from bipartisanship or from the PSOE.
"Many of the things we have achieved are blurred by the corruption cases that have emerged from the PSOE"
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Q: You are a computer engineer and in your group you handle Digital Transformation issues. The Law on the Protection of Minors in Digital Environments was recently unblocked. What is your analysis of the proposal?
A: I have said it so much for the digital platforms regulation law as for the access of minors to social networks: prohibitionism is like giving a car to someone after they turn 18 and telling them ‘go ahead, drive’, without any guidance. And that is the biggest problem with educational policies, the digitalization of society, which is not the same as digitizing citizen services. I think excluding or always focusing our attention on minors and not looking at the platforms is the mistake.
If a society is alcoholic as a whole, the father and the mother, we cannot say ‘let’s isolate the child’. No, because society itself is drunk on disinformation, on lack of tools, on lack of time, which happens to many parents, who don’t have time because there are no work-life balance policies.
Now, the standard has been negotiated by the Ministry of Youth and Childhood, with the support of 50 experts, there is a guarantee of a reliable and good standard. I think it can pass because it is a debate that concerns many families, I would not say only for childhood, but for democracy and digital sovereignty itself.
Q: Precisely, a few weeks ago we interviewed the Minister of Youth and Childhood, Sira Rego, in Demócrata, and we had a chat in this regard. She proposed public social networks, free of toxic algorithms.
A: It is impossible from an engineering perspective. The problem is a matter of biases. We would have to guarantee absolute independence from governments to be able to build that parallel reality and compete with these platforms. It is possible to create a public social network, of course, but you have to get the citizens involved. And for that, they have to have mechanisms of transparency, objectivity, and governmental independence. We can fall into the debate about identification on social networks, and of course, giving an ID to a social network whose owner is in Florida does not reassure me, but neither does an activist providing it so that the Government can access it. Many times, we think about public policies when we are in government, but we always have to think about them for when we are not. What will our adversary do when we are not there?
I would advocate more for public data sovereignty. Platforms have all this data and monetize it, they are marketing you and me. I don't like to demonize social media, thanks to them we have even been able to reach institutional politics, it serves to call our relatives in other places… They have a very positive part. Let's have foresight because it is a debate for the future.
Q: All of this, moreover, has been muddied by certain uses of AI. How do you see regulation in this field? What steps can be taken?
A: For me, one of the topics is to understand data as national sovereignty. Governments, how have they operated until now? I worry if Russia spies on me or if another country spies on me. Social networks are a transparent box that makes the individual believe they have individual freedom and are free to communicate and act, but there is an observer, inside and outside that transparent box.
It is important to de-domesticate societies from their own subscriptions. I know it is very complicated, especially after the pandemic. We all have as a collective anesthesia putting on a Netflix episode.
We have brought to Congress the tax the robots. What happens with the labor market? You go to Zara, to the supermarket and there are more and more automatic checkouts. If we have brought so many people to the big capitals and now we are sending them to unemployment, it will not be a problem of Zara, nor of Amancio Ortega, nor of Google; it will be of the Ministry of Labor.
That an algorithm dictated the working day of any person and that the riders go faster delivering, falls on the Ministry of Health because there are more sick leaves. That is the model of country that we have to face.
If there is more Artificial Intelligence, there is a higher productivity rate. What happens to that time? Capital is taking it. And I don't want to get worked up, but it's more of a country model problem. We have to advocate for data sovereignty and create public policies, because with data you can speed up waiting lists, reduce traffic jams…
FOREIGN POLICY
Q: Regarding foreign policy, you mentioned Trump earlier. With the war in Iran, it seems that the Palestinian cause and Western Sahara have been sidelined. How do you see Spain in these debates?
A: I have been involved in many Palestinian movements, and it is very painful to me that it is a genocide that makes it known within Spanish society. Now, everyone knows where Palestine is and who the bad guy in the movie is. The Palestinian people have been suffering a genocide since the establishment of the State of Israel. Now, the President of the Government says it is a genocide, as if it were his own proposal… But I am glad that the PSOE has moved towards this thesis.
We don't even talk about the Sahrawi people, because Spain right now is no longer a relevant actor, beyond nationality, beyond cooperation issues, it has lost its competitive advantage within the Maghreb. In geopolitical and economic terms, Spain has now had to turn to Algeria to diversify energy arrivals. I think they haven't been very strategic.
I don't expect much, but municipalism must be encouraged. There are many very committed socialist municipalities. We must try to reverse the PSOE's position from municipalism.
Rather than talking about Palestine and the Sahara as Spain individually, we have to protect a European position. Who is also in danger is the EU itself, its integrity, its charters and values. Here the Government is true that it is having much more dignified positions. I always make the joke that Pedro Sánchez is not Che Guevara either, but he has drive. Pedro Sánchez had no choice but to listen to Sumar and Bustinduy, but I am worried that it will remain in discursive politics because we continue to have dealings with Israel, which is the greatest threat to the world right now.
"Who is also in danger is the EU itself, its integrity, charters and values"
Q: Throughout the interview, as I've noted, you've mentioned Bustinduy on four occasions. Do you think he could be the right person to lead the space in the next general elections?
R: I have an affinity with Bustinduy because we always discuss foreign policy, he is a great diplomat and we always talk about these things and he leads the committees I am on. It is necessary to consolidate everything we are achieving. He has said no, but it is a fantastic proposal to lead the space nationally. But the candidate we put forward, he will be there to unite all the great achievements.
The interview, long and full of nuances, concludes and, just a few seconds after turning off the cameras, the sound of an old telephone is heard. It was the landline in the Argüelles room of Congress, the place where the chat was recorded. Those present wondered if someone was trying to let us know that we had gone over time and required the space. Tesh Sidi volunteered to pick up the phone and, to everyone's surprise, it was an incoming call for the switchboard of the Lower House. A citizen wanted information to visit the institution. After a pleasant exchange of impressions, the Sumar deputy and representative of Más Madrid promised to receive her, giving her her email to contact. A stroke of luck for the woman, facilitated by an always accessible deputy.