When Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain announced on Jan. 27 that his Socialist-led government would offer renewable residence and work permits to hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants, it was easy to believe that the leader of a new global opposition had been crowned. The less welcoming administration of President Trump was at that moment enduring worldwide opprobrium for its roundups of migrants, culminating three days before in the shooting by federal agents of the activist Alex Pretti on a Minneapolis street.
With his amnesty policy, Mr. Sánchez seemed to offer not just a better heart but a better economic model. Last fall, The Financial Times editorialized that his Spain was “Europe’s standout economy” and just before Christmas, Le Monde called it “the economic locomotive of Europe.” Its growth rate of nearly 3 percent had outstripped those of both France and Germany.
But Mr. Sánchez’s economic model, which is inextricable from his approach to migration, is overrated and in many ways harmful. Spain’s economy has for years been heavily based on tourism, relying on an influx of unskilled workers to staff its hotels and restaurants. This generates cash, but has done little to advance Spain into the ranks of Europe’s more advanced economies. Mr. Sánchez did not invent this model, but he has made it his own. That has not won him as much gratitude in Spain as elite opinion would lead you to believe.
Mr. Sánchez introduced his amnesty by decree — an indication that he did not believe he could win a majority for it in the legislature. And on Sunday, in regionwide elections held in Aragon, he faced his first electoral test since declaring the amnesty: His party lost a fifth of its seats in the regional chamber, falling from 23 to 18, while an anti-immigration party, Vox, increased its seats from 7 to 14. On the heels of regional elections in Extremadura in December, it was the second straight contest in which Mr. Sánchez’s party recorded a dismal result and Vox doubled its seats.
Not only does Mr. Sánchez’s vision of migration appear democratically unworkable, it may also be stoking a populist reaction of the sort that has arisen in France and Germany and taken power in the United States.
Mr. Sánchez and others have justified Spain’s migration policy as a response to the country’s demographic crisis. By that metric it has succeeded with a vengeance. A generation ago, Spain had under 40 million people, and since then has had one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Because of immigration it is nonetheless Europe’s fastest growing major country, projected to exceed 50 million people by the end of this year, with almost 10 million of them born outside of the country.
Generally, commentators present the migration as an economic boon. In the wake of Mr. Sánchez’s announcement of the amnesty policy, El País ran a supportive editorial entitled “More Jobs Than Ever,” noting that there were 22.4 million people in the workplace. But that is to measure the size of the economy, not the quality of it. If, in a country that has added 25 percent to its population, as Spain has, we measure not gross domestic product but gross domestic product per capita, the results are less impressive. Incomes have grown in this century, but at roughly the rate of the European Union as a whole, and well below the rate of the United States.
There’s also something odd about the way the economy is performing under the circumstances. While immigration in Spain has supposedly been made necessary by a labor shortage, the unemployment rate in the country remains stubbornly in double digits, and is still at 10 percent — the highest rate in the European Union. That suggests that Spain has a labor surplus. In Spain, as in the United States, defenders of mass immigration often end up arguing that the new arrivals are doing jobs that natives won’t do, leaving the natives feeling that their character has been impugned and making the subject of immigration a sore one all around.
The more so since it is hard for many Spaniards to see where their country’s vaunted economic growth is going. Barcelona natives complain of a “tourist-industrial complex” that draws wealth out of their city, sending it into the coffers of real-estate developers and off to migrants’ homelands in the form of remittances.
Nor is it clear that migration helps balance welfare-state budgets, as immigrant advocates have long claimed. Since the publication of a landmark 2015 study of the Danish welfare state led by the economist Marianne Frank Hansen, our understanding of this issue has grown more fine-grained and more pessimistic: When low-earning migrants move out of their prime working years, short-term benefits can turn to lingering liabilities.
Since many of the people covered in the Sánchez amnesty are Spanish speakers from Latin America, they don’t pose certain cultural challenges that Arabic or Turkish speakers from the Muslim world do. But the amnesty may cover a population that is larger and less Hispanophone than Mr. Sánchez assumes. His government has spoken of 500,000 eligible undocumented migrants, but Funcas, an independent economic think tank, estimates that the group could be as large as 840,000. El Mundo, a conservative newspaper, reported huge lines in front of Algerian and Pakistani consulates after Mr. Sánchez announced the amnesty.
Mr. Sánchez is a gifted political tactician with an almost superhuman ability to bargain his way out of impossible-looking positions. That may explain why he has stepped back from a domestic political battle in which he is faring poorly, setting himself up instead as the antithesis of Mr. Trump, who is as ubiquitous in the Spanish media as he is elsewhere in Europe. Mr. Sánchez has rejected, point-blank, Mr. Trump’s call for European nations to increase their military spending to 5 percent of G.D.P. He has even drawn Elon Musk into an online feud by leading a European movement to bar young teens from using social media.
This strategy is risky. Spaniards are not likely to rally behind Mr. Trump. But neither are they likely to allow their distaste for him to outweigh more pressing realities. The combination of plummeting birthrates in Europe and surging population growth nearby, especially in Africa, has led Spain’s neighbors and the European Union itself to arm themselves against wholesale demographic change. Though Mr. Sánchez’s amnesty applies only to migrants who are already in the country, a Spain that boldly signals it is an exception to the continent’s tightening immigration policy could bring increased migration flows on itself.
There is nothing more vain than predicting a politician’s legacy. Widely celebrated though Angela Merkel’s decision to welcome migrants was in 2015, its main consequence has been not a more inclusive Germany, but the rise of the populist party Alternative for Germany. There are indications that Mr. Sánchez, contrary to those who see him as a countervailing force to the rising populism of the West, could take Spain down the same route that Ms. Merkel’s country has been traveling for the past decade.
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