Yes, there once was the ‘Spanish model’, remember? Just a few months ago… It often brings bad luck to be pointed out as a model; in Spain’s case, the collapse of credibility has been rapid and brutal. On all fronts. The wave of corruption scandals has tarnished the image of Socialist President Sánchez, involving close family members and party colleagues. Then the reputation of the top student in the fight against climate change was overshadowed. It had already been understood in the past that extreme environmentalism did not benefit the country’s interests, when serious power outages occurred related to excessive dependence on renewable energies. With 2026 came a summer of devastating fires and the clash between ideology and reality was brutal. The reality is that climate change — an indisputable phenomenon — is not stopped by ‘virtuous’ Europe, since the main cause of carbon emissions today is China, over which we have no influence (except to let ourselves be charmed by their lying tales about the ‘green superpower saving the planet’: in one year it has inaugurated more than 50 new coal plants). Reducing emissions is important, but meanwhile, since climate change continues its course, investment must be made above all in protecting ourselves, adapting, and mitigating the negative consequences that affect us. Even at the cost of suspending the ‘ecologist fatwa‘ against air conditioning… Meanwhile, Sánchez’s Spain has had to restore relations with Algeria to increase its imports of natural gas (a fossil energy). A geopolitical step that also influenced the outbreak of the Ceuta crisis. (Yes, I know Ceuta is attached to Morocco, but read the news carefully and you will discover to what extent it also has to do with the diplomatic thaw between Madrid and Algiers).
Now, with the tragedy of illegal migrants invading Ceuta, the last Spanish myth shatters: that of the goodness of open borders to immigration. In that case too, the ‘Spanish model’ was boasted about: a country that, by hosting an increasing number of foreigners (who already reached 15% of the resident population), would have found the magic formula for economic growth. In fact, the Spanish GDP was growing above the European average. Miracle! Miracle! Why don’t they all do like that genius Sánchez? GDP growth is a very strange topic. It is wielded, when convenient for ideological reasons, by the same people who, on other occasions, idolize ‘happy degrowth’, for example, invoking rigidity and ultra-ecologist hyperregulation that stifles economic development. In this latter case, GDP is a horrible, repugnant, and materialistic monster. On the other hand, if what makes GDP grow is the arrival of migrants from the Global South, hallelujah!
Many economists — a caste far from immune to ideologies — often join the chorus of praise for the artificial GDP growth driven by the arrival of migrants. Why do I call it artificial? Because it is. National accounting is based on very simple arithmetic. GDP is the sum of the incomes of all inhabitants and the product of all companies in a country. Immigration, even when illegal, increases the population and, therefore, it automatically makes GDP grow. But is it desirable and quality growth? Here all the problems generated by this illegal immigration must be taken into account. The impact on income distribution is negative: if foreigners in irregular situations accept working for wages lower than those of the resident population (as usually happens), then they enrich the employers who hire them but impoverish the local working classes (especially the most disadvantaged sectors, those who perform similar jobs to migrants). Then there is the issue of social sustainability: if foreigners crossing borders illegally generate insecurity, tensions are inevitable and, once again, it is the lower-middle classes that suffer the most; all this is ignored by economists who make abstract reasoning about GDP.
Then there is the other false theorem: “They will save our pensions!”. These top technocrats, always making abstract calculations on paper, keep telling this story: since we have fewer and fewer children and live longer and longer, social security accounts are doomed to bankruptcy, and the only way to correct this imbalance is to import young labor. That is, immigrants. It is a colossal lie (which countries with demographic decline like China, Japan, or South Korea, all closed to immigration, do not fall for), and it does not matter how many academics keep defending it out of pure ideological dogmatism.
I have already written about this on other occasions, so I will summarize. First, the idea that immigrants finance our pensions assumes that they have regular jobs and, therefore, pay taxes and social security contributions. This is not the reality of illegal immigration, which ends up mostly in the underground sector. Second, when immigrants end up integrating, over time they also have fewer children, live longer, and collect pensions, so the same imbalance repeats. Then foreign labor would have to be imported endlessly, completely altering any social, ethnic, and cultural balance of host countries. Academics locked in their offices do not care at all about sociocultural sustainability; voters, on the other hand, care a lot and that is noticeable. Finally, it is a fact proven in reality that illegal immigration “consumes social benefits” much more than it contributes to their financing: coming from poor countries, with low levels of education and deficient healthcare, it exerts strong pressure on the educational and health systems, as well as on housing policies of host countries. Scandinavian Northern Europe, which was the first to open up to immigration, was not coincidentally the first to close. The clash with reality was harsh.
In short, the brilliant Sánchez, as seen these days, was nothing more than a little Iberian-style Joe Biden. Younger, yes; more lucid, no. I mention the last American president because he too was carried away by ideological dogmas and caused a serious border crisis, which ended up costing his party at the polls and opened wide the doors of the White House to the horrible Donald Trump. Unlike Biden, the two Democratic leaders capable of leading the left to win two consecutive terms each, that is, Obama and Clinton, had adopted very different positions on immigration: Clinton began building the wall with Mexico; Obama was the protagonist of tough detention and forced repatriation policies (the famous scandal of the “cages for detained illegal immigrants” broke out under Obama’s mandate, not Trump’s). Otherwise, Obama had carried out his first 2008 electoral campaign reproaching Republicans for excessive tolerance towards illegal immigration under the Bush administrations, “friends of the bosses.” Clinton and Obama were not an exception, they were the rule: from Roosevelt’s time to Kennedy’s, the left, to defend workers, had always been strict on immigration. Just as a certain Karl Marx preached in the 19th century in his essay The Irish Question. Everything has been turned upside down with the radical chic left, which despises workers… if they are white.
I go back from Spain to the United States to recall that the American model has been for decades the most effective multiethnic society. The most notable example is Silicon Valley: it attracts the best talents from all over the world and allows them to enter the United States legally. These foreigners integrate very quickly also because, even before leaving, they had already adopted the original American dream: meritocracy, work ethic and spirit of sacrifice, enthusiasm for entrepreneurship, and adherence to the market economy. Those who, like me, have lived there know to what extent an Indian or Chinese engineer in California is “more American than the Americans themselves” when it comes to adhering to the values of the nation that welcomed them. This is the immigration that works and enriches the country, not that of Ceuta.
But the American model itself entered into crisis when the woke left influencing Biden imposed a very different ideology: forget the American dream, we are morally obliged to welcome all the poor of the world because their misery is our fault; and when they arrive, they must firmly cling to their values, cultures, and norms, since they are morally superior to us. This is why even in the United States multiethnic society has begun to generate serious tensions. Then, Trump unleashed the infamous atrocities of ICE, but what brought him to the White House were the unforgivable mistakes of the woke extremists. Of which Sánchez is nothing more than another European imitator. He imitated Biden’s America — and today Mamdani’s — without understanding what he was doing.
