By Pedro Sánchez
Imagine you’re the leader of a nation, and you face a dilemma. Half a million or so people who are crucial to everyone’s daily lives inhabit your country.
They care for aging parents, work at small and large companies, harvest the food that’s on the table. They are also part of your community. On weekends, they walk in the parks, go to restaurants and play on the local amateur soccer team.
But one crucial thing makes these half a million people different from other people in your country: They don’t have the legal documents that allow them to live there. As a result, they don’t have the same rights as your country’s citizens and can’t fulfil the same obligations. They aren’t able to receive a higher education, pay taxes or contribute to Social Security.
What should we do with these people? Some leaders have chosen to hunt them down and deport them through operations that are both unlawful and cruel. My government has chosen a different way: a fast and simple path to regularize their immigration status. Last month, my government issued a decree that makes up to half a million undocumented migrants living in Spain eligible for temporary residence permits, with certain conditions, which they will be able to renew after a year.
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We have done this for two reasons. The first and most important is a moral one. Spain was once a nation of emigrants. Our grandparents, parents and children moved to America and elsewhere in Europe seeking a better future in the 1950s and 1960s and after the 2008 financial crisis. Now, the tables have turned. Our economy is flourishing. Foreigners are moving to Spain. It is our duty to become the welcoming and tolerant society that our own relatives would have hoped to find on the other side of our borders.
The second reason we committed to regularization is purely pragmatic. The West needs people. Currently, few of its countries have a rising population growth rate. Unless they embrace migration, they will experience a sharp demographic decline that will prevent them from keeping their economies and public services afloat. Their gross domestic products will stagnate. Their public health care and pension systems will suffer. Neither A.I. nor robots will be able to prevent this outcome, at least not in the short or medium term. The only option to avoid decline is to integrate migrants in the most orderly and effective way possible.
It won’t be easy. We know that. Migration brings opportunities, but also huge challenges that we must acknowledge and face. Nevertheless, it is important to realize that most of those challenges have nothing to do with migrants’ ethnicity, race, religion or language. Rather, they are driven by the same forces that affect our own citizens: poverty, inequality, unregulated markets, barriers to education and health care. We should focus our efforts on addressing those issues, because they are the real threats to our way of life.
New York Times
