Spain is having a moment bucking Western political trends. The country has recently recognized Palestine as a state, resisted President Trump’s demand that NATO members increase their defense spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product and doubled down on D.E.I. programs. But there’s no better example of Spain going its own way than immigration. At a time when many Western democracies are trying to keep immigrants out, Spain is boldly welcoming them in.
The details are striking. In May, new regulations went into effect that eased migrants’ ability to obtain residency and work permits, and the Spanish Parliament began debating a bill to grant amnesty to undocumented immigrants. These reforms could open a path to Spanish citizenship to more than one million people. Most of them are part of a historic immigration surge that between 2021 and 2023 brought nearly three million people born outside the European Union to Spain.
Demand has something to do with it: Like many Western democracies, Spain needs more people. Last year the national birthrate was 1.4, the second lowest in the European Union and well below the 2.1 threshold needed to maintain the country’s population level of around 48 million people. Spain also has a big economy — the fourth largest in the E.U. — fueled by a travel and tourism industry that is brimming with jobs that most Spaniards do not want.
But unlike in other countries, backlash has been strikingly muted. That’s partly because some of these pro-migrant measures stem from society at large. The push for the undocumented immigrants’ amnesty did not originate with the government, tellingly, but with a popular petition that garnered 600,000 signatures and was endorsed by 900 nongovernmental organizations, business groups and even the Spanish Conference of Bishops. The government, in turn, has designed a humane and pragmatic approach, offering an example for other countries to emulate.
There are, to be sure, some very Spanish reasons for the exception. Because of its vast overseas empire, Spain was for centuries a mass exporter of people. During the Spanish Civil War and the four-decade-long dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco, some two million people were forced to leave the country, fleeing famine, violence and political repression. Up until the 1970s, Spain provided migrant laborers to farms and factories across Europe. After the 2008 financial crisis, which sent unemployment soaring to 25 percent, thousands of professionals left Spain for jobs abroad.
This rich and complex history helps explain the relatively high level of tolerance for immigration among Spaniards. In 2019, a Pew survey found that Spain had by far the most positive attitude toward immigrants in Europe. This was no outlier. A 2021 study of polls going back about 30 years showed that “Spain has consistently maintained more open attitudes toward immigration than the European average, with less rejection and a greater appreciation of its contributions to society and the economy.”
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