At a time when most European governments are hardening both rhetoric and rules around migration, Spain is betting on an opposite strategy: telling its public why migration matters. The country argues openly that newcomers are needed to sustain the economy, support ageing populations and shore up labour markets.
Between 2002 and 2024, 75% of the 5.2 million workers joining the labour market were foreign nationals or dual citizens.
“The data speaks for itself,” Claudia Finotelli, professor at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, told The Parliament, arguing that labour demand in specific sectors such as hospitality, construction and agriculture has shaped Spain’s transformation into a country of immigration over the last 25 years.
"In terms of political discourse, Spain is very likely a unique case, as the importance of immigration for economic growth has never been downplayed,” she added.
While a positive narrative around migration — as well as cultural and linguistic links with Latin America — explain part of the success, Spain’s experience also reflects a distinctive policy approach that can offer guidance for other countries.
Why Spain’s model works
Spain places less emphasis on whether a migrant arrives with papers or without. Instead, it offers incrementally expanding routes into legality and work.
Since the early 2000s, successive governments have introduced reforms aimed at matching labour-market needs while managing growing migration flows. The result: roughly nine million arrivals in two decades.
“Spain has adopted a very pragmatic approach, implementing an increasingly coordinated form of individual regularisation,” Finotelli said.
Over time, Spain has eased access to residency and work permits, increased investment in NGO-led integration, expanded family reunification rights and introduced job-search visas and youth socio-educational schemes.
At the same time, the country has signed bilateral cooperation agreements with countries such as Morocco or Mauritania. These combine development support with cooperation on irregular migration and, in some cases, labour quotas to mitigate staff shortages while providing safe, legal pathways for migrants to enter the country.
Belén Zanzuchi, a researcher at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), said Spain’s five regularisation pathways — including those based on educational, social and family ties — are an excellent example other countries could partially emulate. However, she cautioned that a full replication would not work, since the labour needs and industrial structures that shape their demand for foreign workers vary widely across Europe.
Europe’s quiet migration alignment
Spain left-led government has often found itself isolated in EU migration debates in Brussels, where most European leaders stress security risks, fiscal costs and tougher border control. Yet many of the same governments are implementing strikingly similar policies, but “in a silent way,” Finotelli said.
Italy illustrates the point. Giorgia Meloni, elected on a hardline platform, has enacted a decree on migration flows for 450,000 foreign workers between 2023 and 2025, and another last autumn for nearly 500,000 between 2026 and 2028 — effectively regularising migrants who are already there.
Germany, meanwhile, has been rolling out extensive integration programs for years, including the Jugendmigrationsdienste, which provides socio-educational support, individual counselling and integration assistance to young immigrants and refugees. And across the bloc, 17 member states have now signed or initiated more than 120 bilateral labour-mobility agreements with partner countries, most of them recent.
"One thing is what politicians say, and another is what they do, but European countries cannot escape reality: more foreign workers are needed," Finotelli said.
An ECB analysis published last year noted that in European countries where the working-age population is shrinking — such as Germany, Spain, France or the Netherlands — migrants have helped offset shortages in the national workforces.
“In the coming years we will see to what extent it is possible to maintain this double discourse of increasing barriers to migration while, on the other hand, saying that we want skilled people to fill the staff shortages we have,” Zanzuchi said.
Limits of Spain's migration model
According to the Bank of Spain, migrants contributed between 0.4% and 0.7% to Spain’s GDP per capita between 2022 and 2024. But because Spain’s population has also grown and many migrants earn low wages, those gains were diluted if looking at overall GDP per capita.
“The purchasing power of wages in Spain has remained stagnant since 2008,” Carmen González, senior fellow at the Elcano Royal Institute, told The Parliament.
She argued that because migrants in Spain tend to fill much-needed low-skilled, low-productivity and low-wage jobs, they have also helped consolidate an economic model heavily reliant on tourism and personal services.
“The Spanish economy has a problem of low productivity,” she added, but also noting that this is “a long-standing issue that predates the most intense migratory flows and cannot be attributed exclusively to immigration.”
Over the next decade, the Spanish labour market will need another 2.4 million people to simply maintain current output levels. Zanzuchi said it’s unclear whether Spain’s current model will prove sustainable in the long term. To her, greater efforts are needed to ensure migrants remain in the country, including increased investment in training and digital skills and improved working conditions — particularly for lower-paid workers.
González, by contrast, called for a “selective immigration policy” aimed at attracting skilled and highly-skilled workers, alongside greater investment in the education of second-generation immigrants to prevent early school leaving. “Spain is the EU country with the highest school dropout rate, which is highly concentrated among immigrants,” she said. ”All this can have a negative impact on the Spanish production model, on the welfare state's accounts, and on social cohesion.”
Spain’s experience shows there is no silver bullet to Europe’s demographic crunch. But it also shows that manner in which governments talk about migration may be just as important as the policies they adopt.
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