Claudia Rivas Alonso: "The value of a diary is also to argue with it"

Claudia Rivas Alonso (Barcelona, 29 years old) subscribed to EL PAÍS less than a year ago. She is a legal advisor in Immigration Law and prepares the exam for access to the Legal Profession. It's Thursday, June 1, six in the afternoon, at the Alice Secret Garden in Barcelona.

Question. What do their parents do?

Answer. Local Administration Lawyers, officials both. I don't know, I think that as a child I was attracted to what my parents did, and I always said that I wanted to enroll in Law. After being a little lost for a few years, not finding what kind of Law I wanted to do, I found Immigration Law. And very happy.

Q. What interested you?

A. Being able to help people. Sometimes immediately. In any procedure and to anyone, from expatriate people who charge a lot to ordinary people who have been here for three years irregularly and you manage to regularize it.

Q. Do you notice in society the difference in the treatment of foreigners depending on the class?

A. Much. It is not the same a foreigner who comes here as an expatriate and will pay a rent of 5,000 euros, than the one who comes to look for a living and works what he can. There is an obvious difference in treatment.

Q. Do you remember any cases that still hurt?

A. Yes, that of a boy who was an activist in Morocco and was persecuted. He was denied asylum because he was not an activist for our government. It is very difficult to be given asylum.

01:49

An appointment with Manuel Jabois

Claudia Rivas, in Barcelona on June 1. In a video, Manuel Jabois meets with a subscriber of the newspaper to celebrate that the newspaper has surpassed 300,000 subscribers to the medium in just three years. Photo: Gianluca Battista | Video: EPV

Q. What's the matter?

A. There is a very big one: bureaucracy. Much easier access to asylum applications must be given. At the immigration level, there are a lot of dating problems, not only asylum. In sites like the call centers they sell you appointments for between 50 and 200 euros, pure traffic. I have seen a policeman say to a woman, "Madam, this appointment is not in your name," and the woman replied that she had paid to get it. And the policeman: "No, you don't have to pay, this is free." And the poor woman complaining that she had been waiting five months to get one.

Q. How long have you read the newspaper?

A. The first newspaper I remember reading was El pequeño País. As a teenager I read El País Semanal, which I continue to read because I have always loved the magazine.

Q. When did you subscribe?

A. In October or November of last year.

Q. Why?

A. I was tired of being interested in many articles of national and international information that I could not read unless I was subscribed.

Q. Why would I unsubscribe?

A. To change completely, also of ideology: not to agree neither in the way in which they tell the news, nor in the way in which they talk about the news and people. Having bad sources or having little variety of them, not updating. Something that I liked a lot about EL PAÍS is that it has always been updated very well, it has been modernized.

Q. Do you argue over the newspaper or with the newspaper?

A. A lot, both. It's the value of a diary, sharing what it publishes or discussing it. When I was 15 or 16 years old, I read El País Semanal a lot because my friends read it. We discussed it on Monday in class, the articles we had read, the reports; We also share articles. I have a friend who is already subscribed to La Vanguardia, for example; When I go to his house, we read it together.