Mass Amnesty In Spain Heralds The End Of Nationhood

A remarkably candid column appeared in the New York Times this week by Spain’s left-wing Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who recently announced his government would grant amnesty to half a million illegal immigrants living in Spain. Framed as an argument for “why the West needs migrants,” Sánchez’s essay is really an admission of moral collapse, and a frank declaration that he intends to destroy his nation in exchange for short-term economic gain.

It is an admission of moral collapse because the Spanish government has signaled its willingness to erase their country, put the interests of foreigners above those of native citizens, and turn Spain into a magnet for Third World migration.

There is some irony in this, because Sánchez claims the primary reason to enact mass amnesty is moral. He argues that because so many Spaniards emigrated to the United States and Europe beginning in the middle of the last century, and because Spain’s economy is now flourishing, the country must grant amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants: “It is our duty to become the welcoming and tolerant society that our own relatives would have hoped to find on the other side of our borders.”

Tellingly, Sánchez does not mention the moral duty the Spanish government has to his own people. Nor does he even attempt to explain why Spain has a moral obligation to legalize these migrants. The parallel he draws between Spanish nationals emigrating to Europe and the United States, and migrants from South America and Asia illegally entering Spain, is disingenuous to the point of absurdity. There is no more similarity between the two than there is between a guest one invites over for dinner and a thief who breaks into one’s home.

But the moral duty argument isn’t the only one Sánchez proffers. He also claims that the West “needs people.” Unless western countries embrace mass migration, “they will experience a sharp demographic decline that will prevent them from keeping their economies and public services afloat. Their gross domestic product will stagnate. Their public health care and pension systems will suffer.” The only way to avoid decline, he says, is to accept mass migration and integrate migrant groups as much as possible.

What Sánchez hints at but does not say outright is that he thinks Spain needs an low-wage underclass, people to “care for aging parents” and “harvest the food that’s on the table.” This echoes the kinds of arguments we sometimes hear from Democrat lawmakers in Washington, that without mass illegal immigration there will be no one to pick fruit in our fields or clean our homes or mow our lawns.

This is obviously a cynical, morally repugnant argument, but even on a practical level it’s a bad idea to import a foreign underclass to do menial low-wage work. A bad idea, that is, if what you want is a stable, peaceful democratic republic. It is unclear if the Sánchez government wants this. Intentionally creating an underclass of unassimilated foreigners, who because they are not citizens have no real stake in the future of the country, is a recipe for national disintegration and ethnic conflict — the kind of conflict that must be managed by a strong centralized state. It’s the kind of thing empires do, not democracies.

Indeed, that might be precisely what Sánchez and like-minded European leaders have in mind. Managing different groups of people using different sets of rules is how imperial government usually works. It is how the Ottoman millet system worked, and how European powers long governed their imperial colonies overseas. It amounts to a practical way of ruling through the division of spoils and balance of power within various factions — factions that do not represent a single people to which the central state must answer.

That is to say, the leftist regime in Spain, much like regimes across western Europe, has essentially decided to impose on their own people an imperial form of government that they once imposed overseas, and to govern their nations like colonies full of squabbling tribes and ethnic groups.

Of course, this is not how democratic nations function. In Spain and throughout the modern West, nations are governed by laws and institutions that at least purport to represent the people, in whom national sovereignty actually resides. The government, to quote our American founding, should derive its just powers from the consent of the governed.

Europe is turning its back on all that. Whether it is mass amnesty in Spain (which will almost certainly trigger a fresh wave of illegal immigration to that country) or the Starmer government’s plans for digital ID in Britain (which is a rather transparent precursor to a social credit system), the drift is in the direction away from representative government and toward imperial administration. What does that look like in practice? Witness the spectacle of hundreds of Pakistani men lining up outside the Pakistan consulate in Barcelona just days after the government’s announcement of mass amnesty.

One thing this will do — besides accelerating the civic decline and social problems already underway in these countries — is undermine any kind of coherent national identity. If all it means to be a Spaniard (or a Frenchmen or Englishmen) is that you are physically present in that country, then national identity becomes fungible. And if fungible, then you can swap people about; they become cogs in a GDP machine, not a people with a national identity and traditions and a history.

Some politicians in Spain are bold enough to say this outright. Recently a video clip made the rounds on social media of Irene Montero, the former Minister of Equality and a member of the far-left Podemos Party. Montero can be seen ranting to an applauding audience about wanting to give migrants the vote and replace native Spaniards: “Of course I hope for replacement theory. I hope we can sweep this country of fascists and racists with immigrants.”

The prime minister, for his part, does not speak this way. But his vision for Spain is essentially the same: destroy the nation, erase its people, replace them with various ethnic communities that can be managed and controlled on the imperial model. Across the continent, this is what the ruling class has in mind. It will mean the end of Europe — and if we let it happen here, it will mean the end of us too.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.