Spain’s leftist government said it was going to offer illegal migrants the chance to regularize their position, saying that the amnesty was an act of justice.
Back in January, Spain’s leftist government announced that it was going to offer illegal migrants in the country the chance to regularize their position. At the time, there was talk that some 500,000 people would be covered, although, as I noted at the time, others suggested that the actual number might be higher, perhaps even as many as a million. Illegal immigrants are hard to count accurately.
Talk of a higher number didn’t fade. Some 750,000 was another total floated in April. At about the same time, Spain’s minister for inclusion, social security, and migration was quoted in El País as saying that Spain would remain a “beacon” in the fight against the global wave of anti-immigration politics led, in its reporter’s words, by the — wait for it — “far right.”
“That’ll work,” I wrote.
Spain’s plan to grant legal residency and work rights to undocumented migrants will be the largest scheme of its kind in European history.
There have been at least 1.3 million applications made, more than double the 500,000 the centre-Left coalition government expected. The deadline for applications is on Tuesday.
Was 500,000 really the number of applications expected by the government?
To ask that question is to answer it.
The Daily Telegraph quotes Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s hard-left prime minister and, to the continent’s Gutmenschen, the “real” leader of Europe, as saying that the amnesty was an act of justice.
For whom, I wonder.
Sánchez also resorted to the sugar-rush and Ponzi defenses. Apparently, this step would help preserve Spain’s strong economic growth (which is real enough) and would help safeguard public pensions.
According to the chief executive of the Spanish Commission for Refugees, the final number of approved applications will be around 900,000.
Let’s see.
Meanwhile, according to recent polling, Spain’s center-right PP is comfortably ahead of Sánchez’s Socialists and, if those numbers hold, will form a coalition government with the populist-right Vox after elections due next year.