Gracias por el comentario, Jose. Italia tiene un pasado de emigración comparable al español. Al igual que España, solo pasó a convertirse en un polo de atracción de inmigrantes en los años 1990s. Dos factores que separan a España e Italia son la proximidad cultural entre la población migrante y la distancia temporal respecto al fin del autoritarismo. Mi intuición es que esos dos factores pueden explicar mejor por qué Meloni gobierna hoy en Italia mientras que en España VOX se mantiene muy por debajo del PP.
Great article. Convincing that both the lack of linguistic and cultural friction from Latin American immigrants, and the lack of redistribution and housing benefits to newcomers, make a huge difference. Is there also something about Spain's extremely low fertility, depopulation, and emerging labor shortages that is contributing here? Given this is particularly acute in Spain, might that make immigration look slightly different from voters' perspectives?
Thanks for this excellent summary, Alejandro. I think it's a lucid description of what's happening in Spain's migration landscape and why. Unfortunately, it also shows how our administrations (Sánchez's included) have allowed human mobility to be governed by defect rather than building proactive policies that can pursue fairer and more intelligent models. This will haunt us in the years to come, when the right&far-right coalition aligns Spain with Europe's antimigration sentiment. Our country had the chance to offer the rest of the EU an alternative path, beyond rhetoric or once-in-a-government measures such as the extraordinary regularisation. I'm afraid we've lost it.
(1) "Yet how a future PP-VOX coalition would actually dismantle or reshape this model remains an open question." As you stated, the New Right hasn't offered a credible counter-model to manage current flows. Spain, and in a way Europe as a whole, must balance its geography, its aging populations, and its need for labor - even Meloni's Italy struggles to strike the balance it desires. Migration isn't going anywhere. If anything, the ongoing migrant question calls for broad political consensus... good luck finding that these days...
(2) The example of your flatmate -Colombian and therefore culturally familiar- is striking. Is Spain unable or unwilling to integrate such migrants in the labor market? Down the road, isn't there a risk of trapping migrants at the margins of Spanish society, repeating cycles of marginalization seen elsewhere in Europe?
Hi Mehdi, thanks for the good questions. Here is my response:
Large-scale low-skilled migration can offer temporary relief on the demographic problem, but it has real downsides.
For one, you need a lot of it. For a country with Spain's fertility rate, holding the population steady requires net inflows of roughly 2% of the population every year, indefinitely. Spain doesn't reach that even now given than more than half a million residents emigrate every year.
Managing an influx of that size is hard on several fronts: social cohesion, replenishing capital, infrastructure, housing. If you get it wrong, which is likely, you can get congestion instead of growth, a complain I am anecdotally hearing more these days.
Immigrants also age. And workers below a certain earnings threshold end up as net fiscal recipients over the full life cycle once pension entitlements are counted, even where they are contributors early on. So the demographic fix is mostly a deferral: it buys time on pension reform but does not change the ugly arithmetic. That short-term relief is real though, and it is why you hear so little right-wing complaint about Latin American migration to Spain in particular.
"Labour shortages" (as opposed to "skill shortages") are trickier because they are frequently manufactured by firm lobbying to hold wages down, either because the firm wouldn't be competitive otherwise, or because it wants to defend margins. My view is that labor shortage claims shouldn't guide migration policy.
In summary, I don't think the Spanish approach offers a realistic framework for other countries to copy. It has meant millions of people working informally for years before reaching legal status and if it wasnt for the fact that most of new inflows share language and culture, I think it would have become politically impossible.
On the causes and consequences of skill downgrading I'm not an expert. Some skills are genuinely hard to transfer across borders, and I would assume we could improve credential recognition somehow. In any case, we should study this far more rigorously than we do.
El análisis es bastante riguroso pero a mi parecer olvida un punto importante y es la tradición de emigración en España. Ahora viene ellos, pero durante mucho tiempo los que emigraron eran nuestras mayores Que porcentaje de españoles no tienen algún emigrante entre sus tíos y abuelos
Sin tener en cuenta la coacción histórica del estado a las naciones periféricas no explicas profundament las razones de la falta de oposición a la imigración. Olvidas que es gracias a Catalunya que no gobierna la derecha en España y olvidas además que el País Valenciano, Catalunya i Las Baleares llevan acogiendo imigración des de hace más de cincuenta años, además de Madrid, con lo cual no es un fenomeno nuevo ni diferente. Olvidando todo esto no puedes entender que el problema que tiene España con Ceuta es el mismo que tiene con Catalunya y que, en realidad, no es capaz de enfrentar: que es un estado plurinacional.
Gracias por el comentario, Jose. Italia tiene un pasado de emigración comparable al español. Al igual que España, solo pasó a convertirse en un polo de atracción de inmigrantes en los años 1990s. Dos factores que separan a España e Italia son la proximidad cultural entre la población migrante y la distancia temporal respecto al fin del autoritarismo. Mi intuición es que esos dos factores pueden explicar mejor por qué Meloni gobierna hoy en Italia mientras que en España VOX se mantiene muy por debajo del PP.
Great article. Convincing that both the lack of linguistic and cultural friction from Latin American immigrants, and the lack of redistribution and housing benefits to newcomers, make a huge difference. Is there also something about Spain's extremely low fertility, depopulation, and emerging labor shortages that is contributing here? Given this is particularly acute in Spain, might that make immigration look slightly different from voters' perspectives?
Thanks for the questions Rasmus. I think my response to Mehdi below directly addresses some of the points you raised.
Thanks for this excellent summary, Alejandro. I think it's a lucid description of what's happening in Spain's migration landscape and why. Unfortunately, it also shows how our administrations (Sánchez's included) have allowed human mobility to be governed by defect rather than building proactive policies that can pursue fairer and more intelligent models. This will haunt us in the years to come, when the right&far-right coalition aligns Spain with Europe's antimigration sentiment. Our country had the chance to offer the rest of the EU an alternative path, beyond rhetoric or once-in-a-government measures such as the extraordinary regularisation. I'm afraid we've lost it.
(1) "Yet how a future PP-VOX coalition would actually dismantle or reshape this model remains an open question." As you stated, the New Right hasn't offered a credible counter-model to manage current flows. Spain, and in a way Europe as a whole, must balance its geography, its aging populations, and its need for labor - even Meloni's Italy struggles to strike the balance it desires. Migration isn't going anywhere. If anything, the ongoing migrant question calls for broad political consensus... good luck finding that these days...
(2) The example of your flatmate -Colombian and therefore culturally familiar- is striking. Is Spain unable or unwilling to integrate such migrants in the labor market? Down the road, isn't there a risk of trapping migrants at the margins of Spanish society, repeating cycles of marginalization seen elsewhere in Europe?
Hi Mehdi, thanks for the good questions. Here is my response:
Large-scale low-skilled migration can offer temporary relief on the demographic problem, but it has real downsides.
For one, you need a lot of it. For a country with Spain's fertility rate, holding the population steady requires net inflows of roughly 2% of the population every year, indefinitely. Spain doesn't reach that even now given than more than half a million residents emigrate every year.
Managing an influx of that size is hard on several fronts: social cohesion, replenishing capital, infrastructure, housing. If you get it wrong, which is likely, you can get congestion instead of growth, a complain I am anecdotally hearing more these days.
Immigrants also age. And workers below a certain earnings threshold end up as net fiscal recipients over the full life cycle once pension entitlements are counted, even where they are contributors early on. So the demographic fix is mostly a deferral: it buys time on pension reform but does not change the ugly arithmetic. That short-term relief is real though, and it is why you hear so little right-wing complaint about Latin American migration to Spain in particular.
"Labour shortages" (as opposed to "skill shortages") are trickier because they are frequently manufactured by firm lobbying to hold wages down, either because the firm wouldn't be competitive otherwise, or because it wants to defend margins. My view is that labor shortage claims shouldn't guide migration policy.
In summary, I don't think the Spanish approach offers a realistic framework for other countries to copy. It has meant millions of people working informally for years before reaching legal status and if it wasnt for the fact that most of new inflows share language and culture, I think it would have become politically impossible.
On the causes and consequences of skill downgrading I'm not an expert. Some skills are genuinely hard to transfer across borders, and I would assume we could improve credential recognition somehow. In any case, we should study this far more rigorously than we do.
El análisis es bastante riguroso pero a mi parecer olvida un punto importante y es la tradición de emigración en España. Ahora viene ellos, pero durante mucho tiempo los que emigraron eran nuestras mayores Que porcentaje de españoles no tienen algún emigrante entre sus tíos y abuelos
Sin tener en cuenta la coacción histórica del estado a las naciones periféricas no explicas profundament las razones de la falta de oposición a la imigración. Olvidas que es gracias a Catalunya que no gobierna la derecha en España y olvidas además que el País Valenciano, Catalunya i Las Baleares llevan acogiendo imigración des de hace más de cincuenta años, además de Madrid, con lo cual no es un fenomeno nuevo ni diferente. Olvidando todo esto no puedes entender que el problema que tiene España con Ceuta es el mismo que tiene con Catalunya y que, en realidad, no es capaz de enfrentar: que es un estado plurinacional.