A Financial Times article from this week claims that Spain “is carrying out Europe’s last remaining experiment in large-scale immigration”. The piece stresses that the country’s open-door policies are a strategic manoeuvre by Pedro Sánchez’s Left-wing government, and that this has contributed to the country’s economic growth. Yet this interpretation isn’t wholly accurate. This “burst of economic vigour” conceals deep-seated problems in the Spanish economy, and above all a widening generational divide. On one side are the young Spaniards who dream of attaining the middle-class status of their parents; on the other are Boomers whose pensions depend on a continuous flow of immigrant labour.

There are two ways of looking at Spain. The first is a success story of carefully managed immigration from culturally similar countries, with inflows sustaining GDP growth well above the European Union average. According to data from the end of last year, Latin Americans account for almost half of all immigrants into Spain, as well as for one in every 10 residents overall. Spanish GDP has grown 8% since 2019, mapping neatly onto a large-scale inflow of newcomers from Latin America.

The distinct cultural profile of immigration into Spain, and its stimulating effect on the economy, has made it a matter of bipartisan support — an exceptional development when compared to the rest of Europe. Even the Right-wing Vox party, which derives support from public backlash against immigration, concentrates its attacks on Africans and Muslims. Party leader Santiago Abascal rarely, if ever, singles out Latin American communities. Meanwhile, Partido Popular, the centre-right party which controls Madrid, has transformed the capital into a centre for Latin American elites, drawing in hispanidad — the broad community of Spanish language and culture from around the world.

Left-wingers, however, seem more conflicted about embracing inflows from Latin America. Data on voting preferences reveals that the group most in favour of the governing Socialist Party is the Moroccan diaspora. There have also been suggestions that plans to remove the easy path to citizenship for Venezuelans are motivated by the fact that almost half of the group support PP or Vox. In Catalonia, where one in four inhabitants is born outside of Spain, the composition of immigration has been shaped by Left-wing pro-independence anxieties, with prejudice towards castellano translating into sympathy for African migrants. The data confirms why this emphasis is wrongheaded: Latin Americans have an employment rate which is 25 percentage points higher than for those arriving from Africa.

There is, however, a second way to look at the Spanish model: that the present “economic vigour” will be short-lived. Politicians from across the political spectrum debate assimilation, integration into the labour market, and how much tax each group of immigrants pays, but they don’t ask the fundamental question: can this model build a future for Spain?

Over the last quarter of a century, Spanish growth has been fuelled by migration flows, which expand the working-age population, rather than rising productivity. Beneath the surface of increasing GDP lies a deeper stagnation. While Sánchez has hailed the ascent of a new economic model, other data paints a different picture. Consider wages: according to the OECD, between 1994 and 2024 real wages in Spain grew by only 2.76%, compared to an average of 30% across OECD members. Eurostat data shows that between 2008 and 2024 real disposable income grew by only 3.94%, while the EU average was 14.29%.

The biggest loser of the so-called Spanish model is the younger generation. Nowhere is the country’s status as a gerontocracy more pronounced than in housing. In 2002, around 65% of adults under 35 owned a home; by 2022, that figure had fallen to just over 30%. Spain has one of the lowest emancipation rates in Europe, with only 14.8% of those aged 30 or younger living independently. Demographic expansion, accelerated by immigration, has collided with a strikingly inadequate housing supply, making homeownership unattainable for a whole generation.

Spain’s addiction to migration shows no sign of stopping under the present government. The main beneficiary is the pension system, while the unsustainable burden of generous welfare payments is carried by the payroll contributions of the millions of Latin American migrants who won’t be able to buy their own house. This seems to run counter to any long-term logic, and yet it squares neatly with basic political calculations. In Western gerontocracies, power belongs to those willing to satisfy the redistributive demands of the Boomers. By embracing mass migration to the detriment of its population, Spain is perhaps the purest example of this rule.

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Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski is a Polish writer based in Barcelona.

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