Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has made quite a mark with his new policy to accept up to 500,000 illegal immigrants. The Spanish Prime Minister listed his reasons for his policy in an article in The New York Times. He argued in favour of regularising immigrants to boost the economy but he also made a moral argument in favour of human solidarity.
Outside Spain, Pedro Sanchez is regarded by the left as a bastion against the far-right. In Spain, he is regarded as the main cause for the rise of the far-right.
There are two different Pedro Sanchezes. One is the Pedro Sanchez of Spain and the other is the cosmopolitan and pro-European Pedro Sanchez of abroad. When Premier Sanchez was regularising illegal immigrants, he didn’t have his local audience in mind – he was addressing the rest of the world. In Spain, working-class members of his own Party of Socialists are abandoning him and committing themselves to vote for the far-right party Vox.
Premier Sanchez is doing European politics because he is gunning for the European Commission. Previously, he had set his ambitions for the the post of High Representative (currently occupied by Kaja Kallas), but Sanchez is now also making plans to gun for the top European post. Our sources are well informed.
Let’s go through this concisely and gradually. The problem about the immigrants is a bit nuanced. Immigrants are not the main cause of crime and low wages in Spain. However, their voluminous presence alongside low-paid Spanish workers who can’t find decent jobs is causing unnecessary friction – if everyone is poor, everyone will find excuses to hate each other, immigrant or not.
The regularisation of immigrants by Prime Minister Sanchez has also been taken out of proportion. The immigrants are only going to have a foreign identification number and will be allowed to work and access government services. The permit must be manually renewed after one year. They won’t be able to vote and they are not on the path for Spanish citizenship.
It’s not the immigrants that are hurting the Spanish economy – it’s the Spanish government with its 1970s-style tax and social system.
Spain ahs a tax and social-contributions system that was created in a time when most workers could work for big firms, earn good salaries and even have their family holiday paid off by the company. These times are long over and as the economy changed and became more fractured with smaller firms, the fiscal system remained the same. The result is that in Spain – there is no social mobility because most workers, especially the self-employed are killed with taxes. For example – a self-employed worker has to pay up to €400 every month just in social contributions, pay income tax and also pay high VAT rates. Basically, working in Spain is not worth it and this is why in many provinces you have more workers registering as unemployed than the number of workers registered in employment. Those who declare themselves as unemployed – also work – of course, but simply refuse to declare their work because otherwise they would be stuck in poverty.
Technically, the Spanish government is incentivising unemployment and the only firms which afford to do business in Spain are the big firms with high margins that have enough leeway and capital to cover massive expenses including taxes.
The Spanish Prime Minister doesn’t care very much about the state of the economy in Spain. The figures being dished out by the Spanish government showing substantial growth should be taken in the context of nearly twenty years of economic stagnation after the 2008 crisis. Big firms like Santander are growing massively but workers are remaining in the same level of economic poverty. Spain makes it excessively difficult for small businesses to exist and survive, and in this system, the big firms keep growing, even exponentially while workers keep struggling with their lives.
Spain purports to be socialist but it’s economic system, although built on an old socialist models, is producing the results of an extreme form of capitalism where the rich keep getting richer much quicker and the poor remain the same – if not even poorer.
Most of the voters supporting VOX are previous socialists who supported the Socialist Party – many of them working-class men who remember when the old socialist model still worked. Pedro Sanchez will not tell this to the Europeans – instead he is pretending he is a bulwark against the far-right – he is not. He is the main cause Spain’s growth of the far-right and it’s not because of the immigrants, it’s because of the economy (stupid).
Website Editor
Historian and Publisher
Leave a Reply