The population replacement rate has accelerated recently, and Pedro Sanchez's leftist government is now seeking to grant residence permits to large numbers of illegal immigrants. The debate in the Spanish Congress of Deputies on the automatic granting of residence permits to immigrants who arrived before 1 November 2021 is becoming increasingly frequent.

Spain, with a population of 47.6 million, has nearly 5.5 million foreign residents, more than a third of whom came from Latin American countries. These official figures do not include those who are in Spain illegally, nor do they take into account the growing number of Spanish citizens of immigrant background.

The population replacement rate has accelerated recently, and Pedro Sanchez’s leftist government is now seeking to grant residence permits to large numbers of illegal immigrants. The debate in the Spanish Congress of Deputies on the automatic granting of residence permits to immigrants who arrived before 1 November 2021 is becoming increasingly frequent.

According to the NGO Regularizacion Ya (Regularisation Now), which has tabled the bill, more than half a million illegal immigrants currently in Spain would be affected. The Socialists’ coalition partner Unidas Podemos supports the bill, as do smaller far-left parties and pro-independence regional parties, whose support is essential for Sanchez to gain a majority of votes in parliament. Opponents of the plan say that the problem with the measure is that it encourages potential illegal immigrants to try their luck in hopes that they will one day be granted residence.

Pedro Sanchez seems to have no problem with this. When the centre-right government of Mariano Rajoy was replaced by a leftist government in 2018, the number of illegal immigrants shot up from 21,971 in 2017 to 57,498 in 2018.

However, it is not only leftist politicians who want to speed up the resettlement of illegal immigrants in Spain. The Confederacion Nacional de la Construccion (CNC), which represents the country’s construction companies, recently called on the government to grant visas to half a million foreigners willing to work in Spain’s construction sector. This is eerily similar to the time when population replacements started in Germany, France and Britain. In those countries, too, various companies were pressuring the government to do so.

Regarding legal immigration, the Sanchez government last year reformed the law on foreign nationals to make it easier for them to work legally – despite Spain having the highest unemployment rate in the EU. The reform will also facilitate family reunification, an important instrument used by governments in Western Europe, which has led to rampant immigration. The measure allows governments to continue what the French writer Renaud Camus called „the great replacement”. He explained how high immigration rates and low birth rates have reshaped the population in his country.

With a fertility rate of 1.3, Spain’s birth rate has been one of the lowest in Europe for years, and recently the country’s leading centre-left newspaper El Pais told readers that the country would need an additional 7 million immigrants over the next three decades to make up for the shortage of children and to ensure continued economic prosperity.

In mid-January, Spanish media published new figures showing that three quarters of the country’s provinces now have more new immigrants than babies born per year. The centre-right El Confidencial, which was the first to publish this data, described the situation as follows: “Spanish society is undergoing a process of transformation that other countries have gone through before and which could change the political, economic and cultural map of the country.”

However, not many positive examples would suggest that it is worthwhile for a government to promote population replacement. Italy, for example, is still paying the price for its pro-immigration, leftist government’s decision to legalise the status of illegal immigrants en masse in May 2020. This decision was demanded by the then Minister of AgricultureTeresa Bellanova to compensate for the lack of labour from Eastern Europe due to the border closures caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Over the past two years, the country has been struggling with an influx of illegal immigrants arriving by small boats from the Tunisian coast, as Tunisia itself has faced a surge in the arrival of sub-Saharan Africans heading to Europe. Italy received around 34,000 illegal immigrants in 2020, over 67,000 in 2021 and over 104,000 in 2022.