The day after all the parties except VOX approved in Congress the taking into consideration of the regularization of immigrants, the National Police detained a foreigner in Madrid in Moroccan origin with a rifle, a pistol and bulletproof vests. The first headlines highlighted the “Belgian” condition of the detainee and then that the subject had a search and arrest warrant for his connection with the Mocro Mafia, a Maghrebi criminal gang that smuggles cocaine into Europe and whose service record includes murders, extortions and kidnappings.
Last January, the Minister of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, Elma Saiz, offered devastating data: In 1999, one million immigrants lived in Spain, while in 2023 the figure is 7.5 million.. Of those almost eight million, only 2.5 work. What does the rest do? Saiz did not know how to respond in parliament. His predecessor, José Luis Escrivásaid upon taking office that our country needs eight or nine million more foreigners in the next three decades to avoid “the Japanization” of the economy.
The legalization of half a million immigrants in an irregular situation, as appears in the explanatory memorandum of the popular legislative initiative supported by the majority of Congress, is of an economic nature (although not only). “A regularization would bring to light, quickly and effectively, the great potential of its direct taxes and the contributions of employees and employers to the Social Security system,” maintains the norm supported by Bildu to the PP.
A recent study (“The wealth of working nations”) of the professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, refutes that the massive incorporation of foreign labor is the solution for economies affected by the aging of the population. “Immigration does not seem to be the solution to almost anything,” says Fernández-Villaverde, since “countries like Canada or Spain, which have brought many immigrants since 1990, have grown less than Japan in terms of GDP per adult of working age.” . There are simply more workers in Canada and Spain, so total GDP grows more, but GDP per adult of working age does not grow more.
Don’t immigrants help the sustainability of public accounts? Professor Fernández-Villaverde responds: «Well no. We live in a welfare state. Welfare states are based on the top 10% of the population transferring income to the bottom 60% (those between 61% and 90% stay more or less the same), either directly with transfers or indirectly. with public services. Every immigrant who arrives in an advanced economy and places themselves in the lowest 60% (that is, almost everyone except those with very high levels of human capital) has a negative added value for the welfare state. Yes, immigrants generate positive cash flow today for social security (they pay contributions), but in the future you have to pay them a pension and public healthcare. In Denmark they have accounted for it in detail and, indeed, bringing immigrants is a loss for them.
The Japanese are right—Fernández-Villaverde maintains—against the criteria maintained by the Government and almost the entire West. “Again, the Japanese, despite the millions of articles in the Western press criticizing them for not allowing immigrants, have understood this much better than we do.”
The motivation of the legislator, as we pointed out above, is not only economic in nature, but also ideological. The explanatory statement recognizes that this proposal “is closely aligned” with international initiatives to which Spain “has solemnly committed”, as is the case of the Agenda 2030 signed by Rajoy in 2015. But also the Marrakech Pact signed by Sánchez in 2018which imposes immigrant quotas on the 27 EU States and the ‘European Pact on Migration and Asylum‘ from 2008.
The reality is that these international migration agreements reinforce the inertia that Spain has been adopting in recent decades. Since Felipe Gonzalez came to power, our country has carried out six mass regularization processes for immigrants. The first is from 1986 and included all those immigrants without a work or residence permit who could prove their stay before July 24 of the previous year.
González launched the second regularization in 1991 with much more restrictive requirements than those carried out later by the PP. Then, illegal immigrants had to prove not only their stay but also present “a regular and stable offer of employment” or a “permanent and viable project of self-employment.” A year later the PSOE opened its hand, since the requirement was “to be a dependent family member of some of the foreigners regularized by the 1991 process.” Those two years the State granted 114,423 regularization processes. The ‘papers for all’ began.
Of course, Aznar would go even further. In 1996 he carried out his first regularization process from which more than 20,000 illegal immigrants benefited. Four years later the second wave would arrive and in 2001 the “regularization by roots.” Total, Aznar’s PP governments gave papers to more than half a million irregular immigrants, a similar figure although still higher than the one approved last week in Congress. The last extraordinary regularization dates back to 2005, when Zapatero broke all records, reaching almost 600,000 concessions.
