Watch the full episode on YouTube or follow the transcript below.
Show notes
This episode celebrates Classical Liberalism and Cosmopolitanism: a real-world demonstration that open markets and open minds can deliver prosperity.
In 1990, less than 1% of the Spanish population were foreign residents. The foreign-born population was even smaller, with immigrants accounting for about 0.5% of residents.
In 2023, Spain alone accounted for 23% of all naturalizations in the European Union
As of 2025…
14% of residents in Spain are foreign nationals.
Nearly 20% of Spain’s population was born outside the country.
1 in 7 residents of Madrid were born in Latin America.
Spain flipped from near-zero immigration in 1990 to one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan melting pots today. We discuss how free-market reforms, EU membership, strong historical links and a now-legendary liberal social scene in the core cities delivered the greatest success story of integration in recent history.
Follow the co-hosts on X Diego: diegodelacruz | Rasheed: rasheedguo
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Full Transcript
This transcript was automatically generated by AI and lightly edited by our team. We don’t catch every error, so if you spot one, send us a message/email via shem@cpsi.org.
Rasheed: Hi everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. Today, we are going to be touching on one of the most important topics in Spain and perhaps one of the most controversial topics: immigration. And Spain is one of the strangest outlier examples of rapid immigration and integration of people into the country.
In 1990 less than 1%, less than 1% of the span population were foreign-born. And in 2025, almost 19% of the population here in Spain is foreign-born. This is an increase. And of course, I'm joined by my cohost, Diego, to discuss this topic.
Diego: It's great to be here. As always, I want to thank everyone who's following the podcast, commenting on the podcast, and even asking for suggestions on how to translate it into Spanish.
We've gotten some requests, but it's great to know that people are following and listening, and watching. And yeah, you bring up a great topic for today because indeed most of this growth that essentially, as you said, like a foreign-born population, went from less than 1% to almost 20%, it happened in the 21st century because the growth in the nineties was very limited.
So we're talking about how in 25 years, in just one generation, Spain has gone from having little to no migration. It was a country of migrants. Spaniards were leaving the country on a net basis. To a country where you see one out of five of its citizens being foreign-born.
Let me give you another amazing stat. In the last five years, 80 to 90% of new workers, of new active workers, were not born in Spain. So 80 to 90% of job creation has actually gone for migrants, not for the local population. Those figures are remarkable. And immigration is a contentious topic sometimes in Spain.
But not all sorts of immigration are problematic in the eyes of most Spaniards. All of the Latin American migration has been welcomed with open arms, and that represents the bulk of the people coming into the country. We'll talk about that, and there are some interesting facts.
Rasheed: We'll get to that for sure.
I wanna start on this, before the rise. Back in the 1980s, early 1990s, there were essentially no immigrants in Spain. The first immigration law in Spain was only passed in 1985 under PM González, I believe. What was the context for starting the immigration boom in Spain?
Diego: The context is that you didn't even have a law because you had no migrants, right?
Spaniards have left the country in waves at different points in our history because our industrialization was quite late. There were some waves of migration in the 19th century. Many of them were Gallegos. Galicians, like me. Galicia is a region in the northwest of Spain. And that is why in some territories in Latin America, Spaniards are called Gallegos.
Okay. And then in the 20th century, following the Civil War and after the first years of the Franco regime, which were a time of poverty in Spain because of archaic economic policies, the economy was essentially closed off to the rest of the world. Something that may sound familiar to those who are following the tariff debates these days.
People left en masse this time, mostly to Europe. So, come the 1980s, Spain essentially had to pass immigration laws because it was acquiring what is known as the acquis communautaire, which is essentially the laws of the European Union. If you want to join the European Union, you need to enact a series of laws and regulations.
This was part of it because there was no need to regulate immigration if you had no immigration whatsoever. And for most of the eighties, and at least the first half of the nineties still the case remained that less than 1% of the population was foreign born. So that's the context and the backdrop before all of this happened.
Rasheed: So then what happened?
So immigration ticks up. Very mild in the mid-1990s, and then just boom right after that. So what happened early in the mid-1990s for immigration to start the, creep up?
Diego: If you notice and we'll talk about it in more detail later on. Latin Americans, who represent the bulk of the migration coming to Spain, speak the same language, pray to the same God, and dance to the same music.
That's something I like to say when explaining this bluntly and easily to people who are new to this topic. And that in principle was the same in the eighties or the early nineties, right? So, it is not like there was any change in that sense. The cultural appeal of the country certainly was the same as it is today.
The historical ties between these nations were also similar. So that's not what can explain this, because if it were about culture, then these migration waves should have been coming in for a long time before they did. But Spain first acquired membership in the European Union, then began transforming its economy.
But a significant improvement took place in the second half of the 1990s under President or Prime Minister José María Aznar. Okay. Aznar came into a country where unemployment was higher than 20%. And the currency was often devalued four times in the previous term of his presidency, between 93 and 96. And essentially, there was no economic appeal in coming to Spain.
That's why most Latin Americans were making their plans to go essentially to the US. That was the de facto destination. And that started to change after Aznar came to power and decided that Spain had to join the Euro and had to enact sweeping reforms to get the economy growing and to pay off the debt and reduce it, and to increase the disposable income of Spaniards. Also, the labor market had performed so poorly under González that when he came to office, the socialist prime minister and president who joined in 1982 as president; when he came to office, there were 12 million people employed in Spain.
He left office in 1996. There were 12 million people employed in Spain. So, not a single job was created under his watch, which is 14 years without any net job creation. Four terms. Yeah, four terms. So he was immensely popular at the beginning, immensely unpopular at the end.
He's popular these days again. So, like he's been able to, reposition himself as a statesman. But certainly, what was not encouraged was a mess. And he enacted a lot of supply-side reforms. There was massive privatization, liberalization of industries such as telecommunications, air travel, energy, and essentially labor market flexibility that came with it.
And as a result of all of this, Spain started to create jobs, and unemployment when he was leaving office was closer to 10% after it had been as high as more than 20% when he came into office in 1996. So in those eight years, the economy was transformed fully. Spain was able to join the Euro from the get-go, so did Italy, which was incentivized by Aznar to follow suit and do the same, and migration started to pour in, and it certainly did.
Rasheed: So, just to make sure people are following, Aznar was from PP.
Diego: Oh yeah.
We have two big parties. It's PP and PSOE. And PP is the popular party, which is a conservative party, if you will. And the socialist party is the one that had been in power from 82 to 96. So, 14 years of socialist rule, no job creation, and quite a rigid economy, currency devaluation.
So, on with Aznar 1996 to 2004, there were supply-side reforms, and there was job creation. There is accession to the Eurozone, and therefore, there is no longer a devaluation. That's essentially proven to be a dramatic shift in the economic conditions that Spain could offer to migrants.
Rasheed: One of the dramatic shifts in terms of employment, I thought, under Aznar, was the construction boom.
So from 1997 until around 2006, there were some years where Spain built more homes than Germany, France, and the UK combined. That is just shocking
Diego: Yes. And, however, if you notice the period, most of the housing units that were started were because more family units needed housing. In his first term and most of his second term, that was not an issue. The numbers were staggering. But after all, a lot of migrants were coming into the country. The first million came in just a couple of years under his watch. And so that called for a lot of home development, construction development, and so on.
In later years, when Zapatero, a socialist prime minister, took over as president... We call them the president here in Spain. That's why I keep referring to them both as PMs and presidents. From 2004 to 2007, that's when that reasonable increase in construction just went completely wild, and a real estate bubble was inflated and eventually left Spain in very dire condition.
But that was later on. It did hurt many of these migrants, those who were employed in construction, but we'll come to that later.
Rasheed: So, under the Aznar boom, was there a concurrent policy of trying to promote migration into Spain, or was it like so many things are happening, the migrants just started coming themselves?
Was there also a push factor, or, sorry, a pull factor, to getting migrants in explicitly by the Aznar administration?
Diego: It wasn't so explicit. I guess it was just implicit. We could just argue that if your economic conditions get better and you have labor shortages in some industries, and if the cultural conditions were always there, it just seems like a natural thing. If we just pick someone randomly around Europe today and we tell them, "Hey, did you know that one out of five people living in Spain are migrants and that most of them come from Latin America?"
I don't think that they would be shocked. It sounds natural, right? But the thing is that it wasn't coming in naturally before these economic reforms were put in place. The Euro gives you a lot more purchasing power than the peseta. So it also makes sense because most of these families, one of the things they do when they come from humble beginnings, in many cases, they need to send remittances back home, send money back to their families. It's not the same to send euros as to send pesetas. So all of these factors were changing and evolving, and it just became a natural situation. But most of the push factors in Latin America were also self-inflicted policy mistakes, and we'll touch upon some examples.
The Ecuadorian case is very evident. They went through a hyperinflation in the early 2000s. They also suffered some natural disasters or complications with climate, such as the El Niño phenomenon, which led to massive flooding, very bad crops, and so on.
And essentially overnight, you had half a million Ecuadorians living in Spain, and three years later, there was essentially just a symbolic number of them. They opened the door, and then came the Colombians. More recently, it's been Venezuelans, so it's been ongoing for other nationalities.
Peruvians have never come en masse in one particular period because their country is doing better. But Argentinians have come in greater numbers when the worst times of Peronist rule. So it's been ongoing for 25 years, but it was never an explicit call of " guys, come over". And it was never an explicit push factor on the Latin American countries, saying, "there are no jobs, you need to leave."
It was more of a natural reaction of people just voting with their feet and finding solutions and finding a country that suited them better than others. The US is still the main destination, but Spain has become a strong second.
Rasheed: When you mentioned that if you ask some normal European outside of Spain, "Hey, do you know that Spain is more than one in five foreign?
They're like, "yeah, that seems right." But now that's a thing that just seems so natural because you come to Madrid, go to Barcelona, go to Valencia. Of course, they're gonna think, "yeah, this is what Spain looks like." But 25 years ago, nothing like this was the case in Spain. Oftentimes, when a foreign person comes to Spain, or my friends when they come to Madrid, they would come here, we'd go to a restaurant, and they were like, "Oh, it's so Spanish." I'm like, not a single person here has a Spanish accent.
Diego: I'm Galician. So my experience in my earlier youth with diversity in terms of ethnicity, or like even foreign-born population, was very limited.
I would travel abroad for exchange programs with school, and that's how I would get a sense of the world. But I don't think I ever saw a black person in my first 12, 14 years of life in my city of Santiago de Compostela, not even a tourist. Same for other ethnicities. So that experience has certainly changed, but still today, you see how migration is starting to grow in other territories of the country. Venezuelans, many of them have also gone to my home region, Galicia. Some of them have gone to the Canary Islands, which has great weather, and also even more similar culture in the same laid back and enjoy life sort of approach.
But the Venezuelan population wasn't that large until one decade ago. So yeah. It's certainly been a big shift that happened rather quickly.
Rasheed: It's a very dramatic transformation. I think the last statistics from the European Union relative to Spain are that, within the context of European naturalization, 23% of all European naturalizations in the given year happen in Spain.
Diego: Yeah. And yeah, we represent around 7-8% of its output population. So that shows you that, like we are doing three times more than in principle, you would think. Another great statistic is that in some years we've done 50% of them.
So, one out of two at the peak of the migration flows into Spain. Not all of these flows are from outside the EU. Those that come from outside the EU are mainly from Latin America. There are also many cases of Moroccans coming into Spain, which is a very large nationality in the country.
Diego: And within Europeans, there was a big influx of Romanians. However, these Romanians have now been in Spain for 30 years. They're growing older, and most of them go home. So the Romanian population came here to live their life and work, but they are retiring back home with their Spanish pension that lasts longer in the Romanian economy. That's interesting. But yes, today, certainly a country of migrants. And then in Spain, Madrid is a great example. We're both based in Madrid. Right now, one out of seven people living here is from Madrid. One out of two people working in Madrid was born either in another region in Spain or another country. So this is an open city. It always has been. And it was originally a place where, you know, after all the free market reforms, people from other parts of Spain were coming. Now people from all over the world are coming as well,
Rasheed: And Madrid is a particularly strange scenario. I believe you mentioned in your book that there is this idea of the lack of accent in Madrid, which is a good thing in some respect. " Hey, Madrid has no accent, therefore you're from Madrid." Since when have you realized this, let's say almost extreme, but a good way, extreme Cosmopolitanism of Madrid happening?
Diego: That was an explicit policy pursued under Javier Fernández-Lasquetty, who was the key mind behind the liberal reforms, the classical liberal pro-market capitalist reforms that Madrid has enacted for the last 25 years.
He was a member of the government of Governor Aguirre. He was also a key regional minister under Governor Ayuso. And he was also the Secretary General of a very influential think tank. And he always pushed this idea of the "Nuevos Madrileños", the New Madridian. The concept here is that it doesn't matter where you come from, Panama, China, Morocco, or Ecuador.
You're welcome here. You're just one Madrileño more. And that was the explicit pull factor that was trying to lure in this population, recognizing its value and giving tax incentives and other sorts of advantages to people who were coming into work to invest or to just live in the region.
There was also a natural drive to increase tourism in Madrid because Madrid was underperforming. If you walk around the city, it has an obvious appeal as a tourist destination, but it has traditionally underperformed compared to Barcelona. So with so much economic growth and cultural development, Madrid has outshone Barcelona as a tourist destination these days, and that results in a lot of people getting a taste for it, and then just deciding to live here.
Rasheed: So let's be more explicit on the push factors of Latin America. Because it wasn't always the case that there was such a big need to leave Latin America, but in the last 25 years, 30 years, it's more intense now in some countries, especially the collapse via socialism in Latin America. At the same time, this growth of free market classical liberalism in Spain, especially Madrid, has a big shift in immigration numbers.
Diego: Safety is a significant element when you consider coming to Spain because Spain is a very secure country, and Madrid is a very secure capital. This may sound normal to those who have been born with it, to use the term that the woke universities use.
Those of us who were privileged in that sense, but, so I acknowledge that privilege, but many Latin Americans do not have it. Just ask a Salvadorian, all of the extremes that Bukele has gone to, to have some sense of security and safety in the streets and all around the country.
That's always been an issue. So that was a big decision why people also considered leaving. Considering these other push factors, you have insecurity, which I just brought up. You have socialist experiments that have failed miserably. The greatest example is Venezuela, which right now has more than 8 million people living abroad, which represents 20 to 25% of its population.
They've essentially driven out one out of four Venezuelans with massive inflation, expropriation of private assets and goods, rampant violence on the streets, sometimes higher homicide rates than Afghanistan during the war years. So that's a big driver.
The failed socialist policies in Ecuador, Venezuela, and other Latin American countries have driven people out. And then, just structural poverty is also an issue in Latin America compared to the us and it is also compared to Spain, like actual poverty. Not risk of poverty numbers, but actual poverty in Spain is at around three, 4%.
Coherent with a developed nation. Not, 40, 30, 20% like you'll see in some Latin American countries, even 80, 90% in the socialist countries of Cuba and Venezuela.
Rasheed: So we have now this massive inflow of Latin Americans, Moroccans also, we'll get to that at some point in another episode. But what about the integration?
So from my perspective, I think the integration in, at least Madrid, is shockingly good. But we can maybe push back to see if that's true. But how, from your perspective, growing up in Spain, think about its number in more dramatic ways now?
How has the integration happened? Good. Is it contentious?
Diego: Immigration was never a relevant topic until recently. When it became a hot topic, almost. Everywhere in Europe.
Rasheed: How recent is that?
Diego: The last six years, I would argue. Okay. A bit before the pandemic and these days and there's been a lot of pushback against the sort of migration that does not integrate or assimilate with some of the basic elements of your society, of your economy, of your culture, et cetera.
Because people see someone acting differently, behaving differently, and sometimes there are also some problems involved with it, such as insecurity or crime and or lack of economic integration. So that's become an issue, a huge issue, mostly speaking about Europe, so it's a big topic in Germany, in France. It was a big topic in the election in Italy.
And the UK has also been discussing these topics a lot. Although they're no longer in the EU. As for Spain, I don't think there was any contestation to this migration coming in from Latin America for a very long time because they're essentially filling in for jobs that Spaniards do not take up initially.
Their second generation may be competing in the labor market, but we have more people employed today than we did when all of these waves started coming in. So, essentially, there has been labor integration in that sense. So I don't think that's been a big issue. However, the same is not necessarily true with the Northern African and Middle Eastern migrants.
There is contestation against that sort of migration, and that has become a bit more problematic because there is this sense that these migrants do not always integrate. These migrants take in public subsidies and money, and there is some truth. There is some propaganda behind that discourse.
But I think it is mostly on point when you do see the numbers that crime rates are higher for those groups. Economic integration is lower for those groups, and subsidies are also disproportionately given out to the population coming in from those nations. So that conversation should be had, but it should be had openly and honestly, because if you just target immigration completely, then you're leaving out the fact that maybe there is something that should be done about some of the shortcomings on that end. But all the other incoming migration has been so positive to Spain, and especially the Latin Americans. That would be a big mistake. So it's become more of an issue these days.
Vox, which is the populist right in Spain, has spoken about this extensively, and it has caught on as one of its key or core messages. But I don't think they're targeting Latin Americans either in their discourses, it's mostly focused on the Northern African and Middle East countries, which essentially ties down to Moroccans.
Because the vast majority of them come from Morocco.
Rasheed: So that's a key point. So Vox talks a lot. Talk is perhaps even a nice word to use in this context. They propagate a lot of information about migration to Spain. But even when you check the AI images of the different quotations that they show on Twitter or Instagram, you will never see an image of a Latino.
Never. It's always some person who looks very Arabic or specifically Moroccan in the propaganda imagery. Or for example, it'll go further and have ladies in full veil and so on. They don't ever point out any kind of issues with Latin Americans in Spain, which is a very key distinction when it comes to the immigration conversation in Spain.
It's almost not even implicit. When people have arguments against immigration or migration into Spain, they usually have one kind of group in mind.. We're in other countries. That might be the case also, but it's so explicit, I think, in Spain. And just to give a quick number when it comes to this conversation globally. So people outside of Europe tend to, when they think migration issues, they often think the UK, or I think Germany, for example, now, especially with the AFD rise in particular. So Germany's population between 2000 and 2003 increased by 3%. During the same period, 2000 - 2003, Spain's population increased by 19%.
And yet, when you think of immigration problems, you don't think of Spain? You think Germany or you think the UK.
Diego: And that kind of shows you what I was going for before, when I was saying that most of these migrants that come from Latin America, pray to the same God, speak the same language, and dance to the same music, probably reggaeton these days. Spaniards love it, and it comes from Latin America. So that creates a more homogeneous interaction with the local population. I think on the cultural side, the language has never proven that much of an issue for Moroccans, but they do learn it, but of course it's not the same as it being your mother tongue, as is the case with Latin Americans. And culturally, we are quite separate. For instance, the way you position women in society, and other ways of understanding life. And these cultures are meeting this increasing resistance. And a very interesting case here is the comparison between Madrid and Barcelona.
Because Madrid has a lot of foreign-born population, most of them are Latin Americans. And Moroccans represent quite a large share of the migrant population in Barcelona. The perception of immigration in Madrid is that it has created jobs. It has created businesses. It has created a more plural and lively culture.
If you talk about migration in Barcelona, suddenly the conversation becomes about crime, lack of integration, that sort of ordeal. So that represents a clear example of these differences in the way your migration population is spread. It shows you that the outcomes may be different.
And that case can certainly be made with the numbers in front of you. But I think that it's always important to remain committed to the basic idea that if you make Spain a country where one can work honestly and progress, and make a living, if you don't hurt your neighbor in any way, shape or form and just pursue your own life, everyone should be welcome.
And it's more of defunding the sort of programs that may incentivize non-working type of migrants coming into Spain. And also culturally, I think a greater degree of tolerance should also be in the mix than we see these days with this heightened rhetoric around migration.
And then on crime, you need to be tougher because that's the only way people don't see a perception of injustice. Because if there is more crime coming in from a migrant or a local group, that's not really what should matter. What should matter is the actions of that individual and how they should be treated before the law.
Rasheed: So the point you mentioned just now about culture and affinity in particular, I think that is us sitting here in Madrid, we get what that means. But to spell it out a bit... So, for example, you go to a bar in Madrid and you hear Carol G, who's Colombian or here, or Bad Bunny, from Puerto Rico.
Shakira will come to Madrid and perform 10 concerts in the Real Madrid stadium, and sell out all 10 concerts back to back.
At the same time, you would have Rosalía, a famous Spanish singer would go to Bogotá, sell out concerts every single time she's there.
Diego: And Latin Americans probably support Real Madrid, if they have good taste in football, if they don't, they probably support Barcelona.
Rasheed: On both sides, the Spanish norm-
Diego: The soft power is completely interlocked.
Rasheed: Spanish-born people listen to Latino music. Latino-born people listen to Spanish music.
Diego: The most popular show on Netflix that was ever produced in Spanish was called "Money Heist" in Spanish, "La Casa de Papel"; it was produced in Spain, where it was not a hit. Latin Americans made it a hit, and then Spaniards started watching.
"Elite" is a teen drama, a high school drama. Highly sexualized, though, for high school. But my high school wasn't like. But the Latin American population that watches this on Netflix made it such a hit that it became a bigger hit here. Reggaeton singers reference the Spanish actresses on the show. So that's how much the cultures overlap. It's as if you're speaking of the same conversation. I have students in my university coming from both sides of the ocean, and it's like teaching the same group.
Rasheed: It's a very important thing to explicate to listeners because it's such a close tie. Another point is this idea of naturalization, which we mentioned a couple of times already. So, Spain has a very strange rule in the Civil Code, Article 22.1.
A citizen of the former Spanish colonies, so essentially all Latin America, except Brazil and so on, plus the Philippines, Equatorial Guinea, after two years of legal residence in Spain, they can qualify for citizenship, if you're from one of these countries. Two years is a very quick time. So that's why oftentimes, when you see the data about the population groups that live in Spain, if you're not careful, you miscount. Because after two years, Venezuelans become Spanish. So people in Spain know how to count properly, but oftentimes when you see data from America, for example, I realize no.
That data cannot be correct because they miss this two-year thing. But also this two-year rule that comes to acquiring Spanish citizenship has, I would think, a very strong view when it comes to integration. Because you're not just a person who has a cultural affinity to Spain.
You are now a Spanish citizen, you have citizenship after two years of living in Spain. So that has a very big impact as well. And I think people don't realize how much Spain has put into the legal workings. Again, there wasn't like an implicit call to come, but since you're here and you're already so like us, why don't you become Spanish very quickly?
And you'll see also in the political parties where the political parties in Spain, from PSOE to Vox, even to PP, they have these programs where they know when Latinos come, they join the party because in two years you're gonna vote. So let's just start now. So, even the cultural element of politics is geared towards newcomers as well.
Diego: If you're not a citizen, but you're a resident, you can vote in the local election. That's right. That's interesting. So first off, you can travel visa-free in many cases if you're doing this for travel. So many people actually got their first taste of Spain under the sort of scheme that you just get on a plane, land, and you're here, and you just see it.
Okay, so that's interesting because it gives them immediate access to not just Spain, but Europe. They can travel around. And this is already a tourist visa, but the fact that it's completely free of bureaucracy helps a lot of nationalities. Venezuelans had that, and it facilitated a lot of them coming in to just see what the country was like and whether they would entertain moving over.
And many people who moved illegally also used this visa-free situation to just come here and then just stay without papers, like we say in, in Spanish "sin papeles". But then it's easy to get those papers if you've been working in the shadow economy for a couple of years.
Rasheed: See, that's also a very strange thing about Spain. Spain has this tacit liberalization of open borders for Latin Americans, where you come to the immigration border and they know a large chunk, especially Colombians and Venezuelans in particular, will come into Spain on tourist visas, and just stay for a long time.
Diego: You come in legally, but then you stay longer than you should. Which de facto makes you an illegal alien in the country. But like you said, you get a job offer here...
Rasheed: Just get a job. Just get a job.
If you work for a while, there are normal legal procedures to get your papers, and eventually you can become naturalized. Yes, it will take longer, a few more years than if you just come in legally and have a job from the get-go. But there is this acceptance, this is a thing that happens.
And we aren't gonna push back that hard against it. Spain has had these waves of regularization, even from the time of Gonzales. So there was a regular regularization process where you had amnesty for these non-legal immigrants.
But this thing is not irregular. It has happened four or five times. So I think the biggest wave was under Zapatero. It was like 700,000 people regularized.
Diego: And then, when you do apply for a visa in Spain, for Latin American countries, the acceptance rate is normally 80 - 90%.
That's quite high. So that shows you that if you just want to do everything properly, as one probably should, you're essentially going to be granted that residence permit. Then you have that two-year window in which you can live in the country as a resident, and then you could apply to be a Spanish national.
And then there was also a Golden Visa program in place for those of higher income. And it wasn't necessarily like this trump card that he's outing for, like people that are investing $5 million and then get American residents. Immediately. Essentially, you bought a home, a regular home you could get the Golden Visa.
So it wasn't so much of a Golden Visa. You just invest in a home, then you are allowed to come into the country. So a lot of higher-income, but not necessarily rich individuals who were considered in Spain, decided to come to Spain, so that now they're living here, and they have their citizenship.
They are European citizens, not just Spanish. So that gives them more flexibility, whether they may want to change and live in Italy for a while or whatever, that's part of the deal when you're a Spanish citizen, you're also a European citizen. So that's all that happened quite naturally.
And yeah, like you said, if you notice, although there hasn’t been an explicit call to, just bring all of Latin America over to Spain, the laws reflect the fact that we see this fairly naturally and that there's not a lot of tensions around that, for sure.
Rasheed: There's also this cultural affinity. It's security, but it's also the Spanish values, the much more liberal values of Spain compared to most of Latin America. So this to me is very crystallized when you think of, for example, gay rights.
So there's a fairly popular singer in Spain, La Cruz.
He does reggae music, but it's very gay themed instead of your typical heterosexual themes from reggaeton. And he's from Venezuela. He said I could never make this music in Venezuela, but here in Madrid, I'm a popular singer. Then, when you come to, Barrio Chueca (gay district), for example, you will see almost every gay person in Latin America knows Chueca, and they wanna go to Chueca. So it's that kind of liberal policy. It's also the free market economics, but also the very classical strong value of Spain, which also has this benefit. People come in and they're attracted to it and they want to inhabit it.
Diego: Spain is very tolerant in that sense. Also, there's a lot of intermarriage between Spaniards and Latin Americans. There's a joke about it. "Why wouldn't we do this today when we were doing it 500 years ago?" Referencing the fact that the number of children that were born out of Spaniards and indigenous population in Latin America was extremely high, much higher than in other empires in which there wasn't so much quote unquote inbreeding.
So that blend, that mixture, that fusion it's a reality today. You see a lot of inter-racial couples from both sides of the Atlantic. Maybe not interracial, but both of the same ethnicity, but a Spaniard and maybe a white Spaniard with a white Latin American as well.
And I myself have tried that because I'm married to an Ecuadorian, so I certainly know what I'm talking about. But that's quite recurrent these days. There are even numbers. I may pull a number for you before we end the podcast about it. But I think there's an Oxford University study that shows that Spain has the highest intermarriage rates with the foreign-born population of all of Europe.
And that's the number I was thinking of. We blend, we mix up.
Rasheed: There, there's one thing you said before recording about the deep-rootedness of Spain's more cosmopolitan view to the Hispanic world, which you link back to Cádiz, in the 19th century.
Could you discuss that a bit more?
Diego: Yeah. Some of us on the classical liberal end of things and most people on the conservative side of things, we see the experience and the times of the Spanish Empire as a positive era that led to greater integration, greater globalization shared values, shared cultures, and the, there was a lot of things that were not positive at this time.
But when you notice the things that were going on at those very same historical periods in other parts of the world. One cannot say that the situation was very different. In fact. A case could be made that indigenous populations today are much larger in the former Spanish territories than in the territories of other empires, which would suggest that, instead of suppressing them, there was more of a tolerant approach.
Many of the early human rights theories were constructed under the Spanish Empire. Of course, I don't want to go down a rabbit hole. I'm aware of all the negative elements of the Spanish Empire. I'm just saying that most of the positive ones get overlooked. And so coming from this perspective, that is shared by most people on the center right of the political spectrum, maybe some on the center left, definitely not those further on to the left, which are extremely negative about the Spanish identity today and in the past.
But among those who are, one interesting topic is that beyond the rules, the Indian laws that call for the protection of the autonomous populations of the Americans, and so on. There was a very interesting case, a very interesting example. Right before the former Spanish territories left Spain, they were granted be considered of Spanish citizens. Because the 1812 Constitution, which is a classical liberal constitution that's resembles the ideas of the American Revolution recognizes that the values and the rights enshrined in this charter are given to all Spaniards from both hemispheres, referencing the fact that there were Spanish territories in Europe, but also in America even, in Asia.
So that was quite a progressive approach that classical liberals have held onto, still these days, and since classical liberals are hegemonic and libertarians are hegemonic politically in Madrid, and conservatives are also hegemonic politically in many areas of the country, that has remained the case.
One example, former Franco Minister Manuel Fraga, was very good friends with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro because of the many historical ties between his home region of Galicia and the former home region of Fidel Castro's family, which was Galicia.
Rasheed: Yeah, this is a very fair point.
Diego: Franco and Castro. They're both of Spanish origin. Franco is Spanish. And they're both of Galician origin. So watch out for Galicians, we're dangerous.
Rasheed: So this constitution you mentioned, which in Spain is now referred to as "La Pepa".
This was such an important landmark document in just thinking about classical liberalism in general, but it's not well known in the English-speaking world.
Hence, we're gonna discuss it a little bit. So La Pepa was also one of the core documents that motivated a lot of the Latin American revolutionaries, like Bolivar, for example, to fight for freedom. Not necessarily against Spain in some sense, but the idea of Spain was very different at that time.
So there's some nuance involved there. But the idea was that freedom, respect, self-governance, liberty, those ideas that were discussed in Cádiz in 1812.
Diego: With Latin American deputies. In that constitutional assembly, there were representatives from all the Spanish territories in the Americas drafting that constitution.
Rasheed: That's right. There was a very curious period of inspired history when the monarchy had ended. This is essentially it was a non-monarchical period. They were moving to Republicanism, inspired by the French, inspired by the Americans. So they thought, "Hey, we have this large Hispanic world. We don't want the monarchy, we're going away from the old regime into a more classical liberal Republican regime." And they wanted the people from Latin America, from the Philippines, to come and have a say in what the Hispanic world governed from Cádiz, in this case, would look like. And that's why they have these people come in from Latin America.
And then that mentality filtered back into Latin America. So this idea of a cosmopolitan Hispanic world it's probably a better term to use.
Diego: You say that Hispanidad? Yeah. That's the concept. In fact, in this podcast, we're referring to Latin American populations as Latinos.
Which is not necessarily wrong. But that concept was pushed more by the French in the years of their influence in different Latin American territories, Mexico being one example. The idea here is that our languages and culture derive from the Latin Empire, the Latin language, so we're all Latinos. But I don't think Latin Americans see themselves as culturally equivalent to or similar to the French. But the term has stuck.
But the more appropriate term, if you want to be very specific about these things, I think it's Hispanic. Because the idea of Hispanidad ethnicity is that there is a common culture, a common history, a common language, and a common set of values, sets of values and goals, even if you wish, that are shared by all of these populations living anywhere from Mexico to Argentina.
And of course in Spain. Sometimes that's also discussed as the Hispanosphere or the Iberosphere, if you want to include the Portuguese and the Brazilians. So yeah, that's always been there in historical terms. And it explains why this exodus of Latin Americans coming to Spain has proven to be natural.
Rasheed: Yeah. Deep links.
Diego: We touched upon crime and problems with integration. There were some problems initially. Now that I remember, with some gangs and violent activity in Madrid. Documentaries are even coming out now discussing the Latin Kings or the Dominican Don't Play.
These were gangs that were active here in Madrid. But the police tackled that full on. So that probably could have been an issue back in the day. But today, the crime rates are extremely low in Spain overall. It's true, they're larger for immigrants, but when you circle the numbers, it's not because of the Latin American immigrant, but rather because of other sorts of migration populations.
So that's why the assimilation has been very easy.
Rasheed: So, just before we leave the La Pepa topic, I think at some point we had discussed this, and you had mentioned that when you were younger, one of the core conversations that got like classical liberals going was La Pepa.
But now it's not the case anymore. It's more of different things like Bitcoin, for example.
Diego: Yeah, 'cause classical liberals and libertarians today, I think, they read less. I'm sorry. But that doesn't mean they're not well informed of the issues of the day. A lot of these younger libertarians and classical liberals know more about many topics than I knew at their age.
Okay. But history, I don't think it's their forte, and in 1812, Spain was under French occupation. And many of the Goya paintings...
Rasheed: Napoleon.
Diego: Yes. Under Napoleon. And the Goya paintings of May 2nd, May 3rd, which are so famous, and you can find them online, of course.
And you can see the Prada Museum. Those represent the resistance of the people against the French invasion. And the Constitution was essentially passed in 1812 in Cádiz. It's right in the south of the country. It's a city where boats would depart to go to America.
So it even looks a bit like Havana. They both have the boulevard with the buildings and so on. So that constitution was like a document that a lot of classical liberals and conservatives used to refer to as much as the Americans do, with their constitution as a precedent for what the movement stands for these days.
And if we're talking about Hispanic integration, it's even more so the case because you had Latin American, South American, and Central American deputies present in that assembly. Like, how more modern can you get? You don't see that today in the 21st century anyway.
Rasheed: That's true. It's always funny how, in some ways, now Madrid is getting back to that Hispanic cosmopolitan life it was 200 years ago.
So one of the issues that comes up a lot in Spain now, of course, is the fertility crisis, which is quite poor in Spain, like most other European countries.
Diego: That's an understatement.
Rasheed: But at the same time, we mentioned this dramatic increase in population, a dramatic decrease in Spanish-born fertility. Spain has not been suffering from this issue. Do you think this is probably one of the key pro immigration arguments as well in Spain?
Diego: It is. Even when they talk about the debt of the social security, they even make these crazy protections, so that hundreds and thousands of migrants will come in every year. That's not necessarily sustainable, not necessarily going to be the case. If you have such an aging population, your economy is going to have lower levels of entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and so on.
And you may become an old museum where tourists come, and not so much active production is an output are done. So that is why we should look at that carefully. Fertility it's down the toilet. It's one child per woman. The replacement rate is almost double, right?
So it's extremely low. The fact that so many migrants have come into Spain has rejuvenated and increased the size of the population, but at the same time, these migrants start having fewer children than they do in their home countries once they move to Spain. And the second generation Hispanics or Latinos who come to Spain have children at a very similar rate. So that's not going to be a fix for the fertility crisis. It can be a fix to having a larger population, but it doesn't fix the fact that you need to have more children to boost the fertility rate. And because we're living in a welfare state, either you boost fertility or you cut down on the welfare state, but you can't have your cake and eat it.
Rasheed: So, one of the counterarguments to a lot of the immigration, even Latin American immigration, is that they say that Latin American immigration is primarily on the lower end of the jobs spectrum. So, lower-income jobs, more remedial things, activities like that. And that may also have borne out in some of the data.
So in 2000, 2022, Spain, GDP per capita rose by about 12,000 euros compared to Germany at 20,000, or even the Netherlands at 30,000. So Spain had, rapidly increasing population. But not. A concomitant increase also in GDP, but this again is the last 10 years, primarily the PSOE.
In this case, is this gonna be a problem?
Diego: I think the stagnation of the Spanish economy is evident when you look at the gap that we have with other main European nations. We are where we were in 1999 in terms of our GDP gap with them. But that's just a comparison from 25 years ago.
Now, if you see how that has evolved, you can read it among party lines because GDP per capita under Aznar went up to be almost on par with the European average. Then decreased under Zapatero, then increased under Rajoy, and then decreased under Sanchez. So these socialists, they do have a habit of impoverishing people whenever they govern.
And Spain has been no different from that. So with a lot of migrants, Spanish GDP per capita and incomes were growing under Aznar and Rajoy, and with a lot of migrants, GDP per capita and incomes are stagnating under Zapatero and Sanchez now. So I think it's a question of poor economic policy making here in Spain whenever the left comes to power, and sometimes the right is not doing the best it should.
In terms of economic policy, say the first two years of the highway weren't that good, but you clearly see it in the convergence or divergence ratios that Spain got closer to the EU average under the PP rule, under the right-wing parties, and further away when the left has been in power.
Same with unemployment and other figures.
Rasheed: So, to conclude, now I want to come back to Madrid. Madrid has been very liberalismo-focused, capitalismo-focused, especially in the last few years. And at the same time, there's been a dramatic increase in foreign-born residents of Madrid, primarily from Latin America.
So now one in seven Madrid residents is from Latin America, born in Latin America. I wonder if that has an impact on the level and strong appreciation for capitalism, especially in Madrid, given that Madrid is itself much more liberal in the European sense. So that's a libertarian in America.
Diego: Yeah, but you make a great point.
You suddenly have so many people coming in. Is that going to change the paradigm? Are these people of different political values, and are they just coming for something else? I don't think it's the case because there's a poll by Ipsos MORI that shows that support for capitalism now in Madrid is 70% higher than it is in Barcelona.
And then you have the votes, which are the best way to poll whether this increase in foreign population has led to less or more of these free market policies. And then you notice the recurring topic of every election that has taken place over the last 20 years in Madrid is that the center has won.
And it has always been with a free market platform. Like the PP has in Madrid, PP can be a lot of things nationally. But it's a free market group. A free market political party in Madrid. It was under Governor Aguirre, it is right now under Governor Ayuso, and a poll just came out yesterday saying that essentially she would get, not yesterday, last week, sorry, that she would get 73 MPs in a regional assembly that sits 165 MPs. Plus, more popular Vox has 12 additional seats. So, essentially, the socialists have been out of power for more than 30 years now in Madrid. And I don't see that happening anytime soon because who were they (immigrants) fleeing when they came to Madrid, the sort of dictators and populists and just bad left-wing politicians that many of the citizens were fleeing?
Ask a Venezuelan to vote for a socialist, and I don't think they'll be very supportive of that. Yeah, we'll see about the second generation, but for sure it's not the case right now.
Rasheed: It's a good point, 'cause I remember I saw the video when Ayuso won, the last election in 2021, and came out with the balcony.
And you see flags, you see Cuba flags. You would see Venezuelan flags, you see Spanish flags. See Colombian flags waving. And that's such an interesting thing.
Diego: I can tell you I was inside that campaign, and I can tell you how happy and how proud everyone was that this was going on.
They've even held events specifically for Latin American migrants and so on. But the fact at the end of the day, like what Ayuso said then, is that we are all Madrileños and we all want to live free. Madrileños from Chamberí, which is a district here in Madrid, Madrileños from Chueca, which is the gay district in Madrid, millennials from Chamartín, which is a Northern district in Madrid. Madrileños from Cuba, Madrileños from Venezuela, Madrileños from Ecuador.
She made this comment explicitly. That was her victory lap. In her victory lab. She decided to stress the relevance of openness in the economic sense against the COVID-19 restrictions, which were ongoing at this time. And in terms of just being tolerant of everyone coming over to Madrid to just work. And by the way, it's slowly becoming a hot destination for Anglo-Saxon remote workers.
Well-paid American and British, and other European professionals, startups, and so on. So that is a topic for another day, but that's also become appealing. Because if it's so appealing to Latin Americans, maybe that gives you an example that maybe it's a tolerance society overall, not just for Latin Americans.
Rasheed: So, essentially, then Madrid is probably the shining city on the hill when it comes to radical cosmopolitanism policies, while at the same time maintaining very key pro-free-market liberal values policy at the same time, which people think is impossible to do.
But Madrid has shown it works, and it works well. So Diego, that is this episode, and I am looking forward to our next topic. We're not sure what it is yet, but it will be very good again.
Diego: We're always back and forth. There's so much going on. But yeah, give us your comments, share it, spread the word. We'll be here next week for the Capitalism Podcast.
Rasheed: That's right.
> Reggaeton singers reference the Spanish actresses on the show. So that's how much the cultures overlap. It's as if you're speaking of the same conversation. I have students in my university coming from both sides of the ocean, and it's like teaching the same group.
Coming from eastern part of the EU, I would be hard pressed to name a single Spanish actor or actress. In a way, Spain and Latin America seem to be better integrated than the countries within the EU are.
The UK used to be in this position where they shared a language with a bunch of cool countries and were also in Europe. Good for Spain, Portugal