Spanish Fiscal Authority Calls for One Million Migrants A Year

Well, they're being good globalists! Don't encourage natives to have children; instead, import people of a different culture to replace your own.

From The European Conservative

By Javier Villamor

Rather than encourage and support having children, Spanish establishment institutions want to solve the demographic and pension problem by importing more immigrants.

The Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF), echoing an earlier proposal by the Bank of Spain, has recently suggested that, to maintain the sustainability of the floundering Spanish pension system, the arrival of one million immigrants per year would be necessary. This proposal, far from offering a viable solution, could significantly aggravate the country’s structural and economic problems.

Public spending on pensions has shot up to 14.6% of GDP, and, according to AIReF, it could rise to 16.1% by 2050. Although Minister for Inclusion, Social Security and Migration Elma Saiz maintains that sustainability “is guaranteed,” Cristina Herrero, president of AIReF, warns of the inevitable need for additional measures to prevent a further deterioration in the public accounts.

The idea behind promoting a massive influx of migrants is that it would expand the contributor base to support pensions. In theory, increasing the foreign population by one million per year could add about 700,000 additional contributors annually. However, this approach ignores the fundamental costs of immigration.

In Spain, it is estimated that each immigrant could represent an additional cost of between €3,000 and 5,000 per year in the first years of arrival, meaning up to €5 billion per year in direct costs only.

In addition, there are logistical and social challenges to integrating such a large number of new arrivals. Spain, which is already struggling to accommodate and integrate around 400,000 migrants a year, lacks the infrastructure to triple this number. Additional public spending, estimated at €10-15 billion per year, would be needed for housing, education, health, and other public services.

Moreover, such a massive influx could generate significant social tensions and political resistance, exacerbating integration problems and generating conflict in already saturated communities. Even countries such as Germany, with more robust economies and more advanced systems of social integration, struggle to absorb similar migration flows adequately.

Not to mention that even in an optimistic scenario where 70% of immigrants are quickly integrated into the formal labor market, the economic benefits would not be immediate, nor probably sufficient to offset the immense initial cost. According to scenarios analyzed by experts, costs would continue to outweigh the benefits of immigration well into the 2030s.

AIReF itself points out that the solution to the pensions problem cannot be based solely on a drastic increase in immigration, as this measure does not address the root of the problem: an excessively generous pension system that is unsustainable in the long term without structural reforms. Immigration could, at best, provide temporary relief.