Immigration is necessary in a Europe in which the demographic winter advances and loses competitiveness and human capital. This Thursday was the statement made by the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, at a European summit in which the immigration debate dominated by the harshness of the extreme right has focused the discussions. “Balanced solutions” are needed, he said, according to sources present in the room. His intervention has acted as a counterweight to the hardline in the immigration discourse, which is advancing steadily in the European Union.
The Spanish leader, who has already spoken openly against the far-right Giorgia Meloni’s model of deportation camps outside the EU for asylum seekers rescued at sea, has thus confronted the concept of these centers and has underlined the need to reactivate dialogue with the Sahel countries. He has also defended the model of pacts with countries outside the EU, such as Mauritania, Egypt or Tunisia, to provide them with funds and finance programs in exchange for controlling the borders and stop departures towards community territory, explains a person familiar with the debate.
“Spain has a clear and consistent position with our values,” Sánchez said at a press conference after the summit. “It is a position based on humanity. A regulated and responsible migration is the answer to the demographic challenge that Europe and Spain face,” the Spanish leader stressed. “This debate generates conflicting positions, but ultimately what Europe we want to be is at stake,” he stated, “a prosperous and open Europe or a closed Europe.” “We must think about the next generations and not about the next elections,” indicated the Spanish president.
“We are not in favor of this type of formula (of deportation centers), because they do not address the problems and create new ones, we opt for a vision focused on the external dimension, on advancing the arrival of irregular migrants from the coasts of Africa,” Sánchez added after the summit.
In the European Union, only two of the large countries are governed by social democracy: Spain and Germany. In the latter, in addition, the immigration debate is also hardening in the heat of the advances of the extreme right. In this context, Sánchez has in a certain way provided a counterweight to the advance of the ultra discourse that the traditional right has replicated.
During the intense meeting of the Twenty-seven, also the Belgian liberal Alexander De Croo He has expressed his doubts about the deportation camps in a long discussion in which each leader has tried to defend their points of view and the reality of their countries. Like the Polish Prime Minister, the center-right liberal Donald Tusk, who sees immigration from the borders with Belarus as a national security issue.
The so-called Canary route is the only one in which arrivals continue to increase. Sánchez has pointed out that Europe needs to promote ways to channel regular arrivals. The head of the Spanish Government has highlighted the inconsistency of treating the issue of competitiveness and migration as external phenomena: Europe is going to lose 30 million people of working age and if it wants to remain prosperous it will have to learn to promote regular migration and orderly, and integrate migrants into society and the labor market. Spain needs about 200,000 new migrants a year, Sánchez mentioned.
“Legal immigration is a way to finance our economies,” said Sánchez, according to European sources present in the summit room. It is a contrast with the discourse about “innovative solutions” to stop immigration – the euphemism that triumphs in Europe to refer to these deportation camps – defended by 19 European countries, led by Denmark, governed by the social democrat Mette Frederiksen. The Spanish Executive considers that the idea of expulsion centers such as those that Meloni has already opened in Albania – which have also started with many problems and have proven to be a very expensive route – is a “red line” that they will not support. .
Sánchez has defended, together with France and Germany, the acceleration of the migration pact, a complex set of regulations and directives that establish a solidarity-based distribution of asylum seekers among all member states and a clear guideline from when they arrive on community territory. Spain wants to accelerate it and have it come into force next year, despite the fact that the deadline is 2026. At the same time, the Spanish leader has demanded more funds to address the migration phenomenon in the next European budget.
