While many European nations are tightening their borders, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has doubled down on promoting mass immigration. During a speech to parliament on Wednesday, Sánchez announced measures to streamline residency applications, recognise foreign qualifications, and simplify contracts under a new labour migration programme.
“Immigration is not just a question of humanitarianism,” Sánchez told the Spanish parliament. “It is also necessary for the prosperity of our economy and the sustainability of the welfare state.”
He claimed that low-skilled migrants help the economy, working in “invisible jobs,” and whole sectors such as agriculture could not survive without them.
However, Santiago Abascal, leader of the right-wing VOX party, strongly rebuked Sánchez’s words, accusing him of enabling a “catastrophe” across Spain. In a response to the Spanish PM in parliament, Abascal said illegal immigration had surged 83% in 2023, tripling in the Canary Islands.
“You are responsible for a catastrophe on our coasts, in our streets, and in our neighbourhoods,” he told Sánchez.
Abascal added that Sánchez’s policies are to blame for Spain experiencing a huge influx of migrants. “You promise them the paradise that you cannot promise to the Spanish youth, regularise them even if they arrive illegally to our homeland. … Here in Congress, the PP, the PSOE and all the groups except VOX voted a few months ago to initiate proceedings to regularise at once half a million who had entered illegally.”
He urged Sánchez and other pro-immigration politicians to “bring them into your homes if you are so philanthropic and so supportive.”
Abascal also questioned the idea that most illegal migrants are refugees fleeing war.
They tell us that they are fleeing from wars and misery, but women and children do not normally arrive, but instead a vast majority of well-built men of military age from countries where there is no war, such as Morocco, Algeria, or Mauritania. Who are the beneficiaries? The human trafficking mafias and the Islamists with whom you collaborate.
Abascal further argued that Sánchez’s policies prioritise foreign labour over Spanish workers, asserting that “the young and Spanish labour force has to leave Spain in order to get ahead.”
This system benefits only a few while harming many, including Spaniards and legal immigrants, he added. “The victims are the same as always: the immigrants dead at sea, those for whom you make tearful interventions here, who come to risk their lives precisely because they hear your siren songs and because here you finance the NGOs that collaborate with the mafias.”
Sánchez’s plan comes at the same time as a survey for establishment newspaper El País found that 41% of Spaniards view immigration with “a lot of concern.”
A total of 57.2% believe there are now “too many” immigrants in the country, while among VOX voters, the sentiment is even higher, with 86.1% agreeing.
