Vox proposes deporting more foreigners than are actually living in Spain

Vox is upping the ante with its populist hate speech. Echoing nativist 'great replacement' theories and the policies of US President Donald Trump, Spain's far-right party has proposed "re-emigrating" up to 8 million foreigners living in Spain, including Spanish-born second generation immigrants.

This follows the inclusion in one of its manifestos last week that all previously undocumented migrants who now have residency should be deported (around 1 million) and the potential citizenship revocation of naturalised foreigners in Spain.

Rocío de Meer, a Vox spokeswoman, announced the party’s intention to also expel up to eight million people of foreign origin from Spain, a figure that exceeds the official total number of foreign residents in the country, which is around 6.9 million according to Spain’s national stats body, INE.

READ ALSO: Vox calls for mass deportations and Spanish citizenship audit for foreigners

As reporting in the Spanish press has suggested, this must therefore include not only foreigners living legally in Spain with valid residence permits but also ‘second-generation’ immigrants, in other words those born in Spain, many of whom have Spanish nationality.

According to De Meer, Spain is “at a point of no return” and faces “an unprecedented transformation” due to “demographic replacement” that “is changing the configuration of society.”

De Meer, whose name is presumably of Dutch or German origin, said that in the 1990s the percentage of foreigners in Spain was 1 or 2 percent of the total population whereas now there are “millions and millions of people” who have come “encouraged by the two-party system” of the centre-left Socialists (PSOE) and centre-right Partido Popular (PP).

Polling suggests that the PP, which has adopted harder immigration rhetoric in response to the rise of Vox in recent years, would at the next election need the far-right to get a governable majority at the next election, slated for 2027. By making such an ambitious and detail-free proposal, political pundits in the Spanish press have interpreted the policy as an attempt by Vox to pressure the PP and pull the debate rightward. It also plays into populist talking points from around the world, notably President Trump.

For the Spanish-far right, the justification for mass re-emigration seems to be a failure of cultural adaptation and integration as well as crime. “If out of the 47 million inhabitants in our country, around seven, or more than seven million because we have to take into account the second generation, eight million people who have come from different backgrounds in a very short period of time,” de Meer said. “It is therefore extremely difficult for them to adapt to our customs and traditions.”

This phenomenon, she argued, has caused Spanish society to change “so that the streets are often not Spanish, and the tranquillity of many towns, neighbourhoods and squares is not the same.” It is true that the rate of foreign nationals convicted per 1,000 inhabitants is double that of Spanish nationals (18.1 compared to 7.5) but in 2022, 74.19 percent of those convicted in Spain were Spanish nationals, compared to 25.81 percent who were foreign nationals, according to Spanish daily El País.

Despite that, Vox, whose other political heavyweights include Javier Ortega Smith, of English and Argentinian origin, claim mass deportations are now necessary.

READ ALSO: What a Vox government could mean for foreigners in Spain

“There is only a bad solution and a less bad solution, and therefore all these millions of people who have come to our country very recently and have not adapted to our customs and in many cases have caused insecurity in our neighbourhoods and in our communities will have to return to their countries,” de Meer stated.

De Meer admitted that the proposals would be an “extraordinarily complex process” but reiterated that “we are committed to this process of re-emigration because we believe that there is something more important to preserve and we have the right to want to survive as a people. “We believe that mass re-emigration processes must be implemented to alleviate all the damage caused by the policies of the two-party system. For us, there is no choice, it is a duty.”

How exactly this would be done, let alone the legal ramifications or economic impact on the country, remains unclear. Deporting 8 million people would likely be an administrative impossibility, so this proposal is likely more of a rhetorical device than a serious proposal.

It also goes against demographic reality. A recent study by the Bank of Spain estimates that the country will need up to 25 million more immigrant workers by 2053 in order to combat ageing and maintain the ratio of workers to pensioners.

The immigrant backgrounds of high-ranking Vox members, combined with the fact that the party seems happy to defend certain types of foreigners from harassment, most recently Germans in Mallorca, suggests that the far-right party views certain immigrants as acceptable and others as not. Vox has been openly critical of anti-tourism protests in Spain, a movement that targets largely white, European, wealthy foreigners.

Vox spokeswoman in Congress, Pepa Millán, confirmed to the Spanish press that her party supports expelling not only irregular immigrants, but also "all those who have entered legally and demonstrate an inability to integrate." What the criteria for this would be is unclear.

Though no specifics were mentioned about the plan or the immigrants to be re-emigrated, the implication is that it would mainly target North Africans, sub-Saharan Africans and possibly some Latino migrants too. There’s no suggestion the roughly 400,000 or so Brits living in Spain, for example, some of whom don’t speak Spanish and live largely separate, unintegrated lives, would be at risk of deportation.

Though Morocco is the country of origin for most foreign residents in Spain (over 900,000), the majority are European (2.4 million), followed by those from the Americans (2.2 million) and Africans (1.2 million) in third place, according to INE data for 2024.

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