Recruitment drive

Regular readers of this column will be shocked to hear me agreeing with PM Pedro Sánchez, but this week I felt I had no choice. After more than one million migrants applied for TIEs and work permits before Tuesday’s deadline, in response to a regularisation programme announced by the government in January, Sánchez said the uptake showed “just how necessary this recognition of rights and responsibilities was”.

Reaction to this bold experiment, both within Spain and across Europe, has been mixed. Conservatives hate the idea and Spain’s Supreme Court has even questioned its legality. But it is hard to argue with Sánchez’s claim that immigrants will be crucial to Spain’s future prosperity.

One is led to this conclusion by a clear-eyed assessment of Spain’s demographics - something which the Spanish right has clearly failed to do. Vox revealed that it is living in the past when it criticised Sánchez for attempting the “demographic, social, labour and electoral transformation of Spain”. I hate to bring bad (i.e. good) news to Vox-leader Santiago Abascal, but that transformation has been under way for decades, and Spain’s economy has benefited enormously from it.

In 1975, the year that Francisco Franco died, Spain’s population was 36 million. Last year, it reached 49 million, an increase of almost 40%, mainly caused by two waves of immigration, one between 1995 and 2008 and the most recent from 2018 onwards. The country’s foreign-born population surged from just over half a million in 1996 to 10 million - almost 20% of the total - at the end of last year.

“Ah yes,” runs a typical reactionary response, “but they’re all sitting around sponging off the state, aren’t they?” The opposite is true. Foreign-born workers took 44% of new jobs last year and now account for 14% of Spain’s workforce, contributing 10% of social security revenue. Crucially, the labour force participation rate among immigrants - that is, foreign-born adults who are either in work or actively seeking it - is almost 70%. For Spain as a whole, it is 56%.

Over the same period, Spain’s native-born workforce has reduced dramatically. The fertility rate has fallen from three in 1964 to 1.2 in 2025, one of the lowest in the world (2.1 is the rate required to maintain a population level without immigration). Together with increased life expectancy, this has resulted in a rapidly-ageing population.

These statistics demonstrate two things. 1) That immigration has been a key factor in Spain’s economic transformation over the last fifty years; and 2) That foreign-born workers will be increasingly necessary to maintain the country’s welfare state and elderly population. Now we see Sánchez’s regularisation programme for what it really is: a massive recruitment drive.