The West Needs Migrants, says by Pedro Sanchez, the Prime Minister of Spain in the February 9 issue of the New York Times.
Note that he doesn’t says that ‘Spain Needs Migrants.” This seems like a direct challenge to our President; the damage he has caused us as well as to the remainder of Europe, which has moved to the right.
At the time of this event my wife and I were in Barcelona, Spain when this took place.
Our first stop was on January 26 at the airport in Barcelona where our driver was from Pakistan. We then arrived at our hotel and met the day clerk who was from Senegal. At the restaurant outside, our waitress was from the Philippines.
on Wednesday our driver was from Angola and our two waiters from Bolivia and Columbia.
When we returned to Barcelona after a short trip to France, the woman cleaning our hotel room was from Ghana, the man and woman at our first restaurant were from the Philippines and Mexico and the man on our second restaurant was called Tarick and was from Azerbaijan.
Barcelona is Spain’s second largest city and is the key to the Catalan region of Spain. One of the newspapers there said that two thirds of the local Catalan supported this national ban.
From the Philippines.
Back on August 12, 2025, a NYT article talked about how this would help. I paid it little interest, focusing on the current situation here in the USA. The writer of that article, Omar G. Encarnacion is actually from Bard College in New York, but his article seemed to make perfect sense.
He cited that “Like many Western democracies, Spain needs more people. Last year the national birthday was 1.4, the second lowest in the European Union and well below the2.1 threshold needed to maintain the country’s population level of around 48 million people. Spain also has a big economy -the fourth in the EU – fueled by a travel and tourism industry that in brimming with jobs that most Spaniards do not want.”
(According to Wikipedia, our own growth for 2025 is only 1,58 percent, well below the 2.1 level. We too are way below the kind of birth rate we need to keep our own country vital.)
Look at tourist statistics and you will see why. The major countries are listed below.
France – 102 million tourist per year – pop. 68 million
Spain – 93.8 million tourists per year – pop. 50 million
USA – 77 million tourists per year – pop. 341 million.
So, it’s obvious that Spain with a population roughly one seventh of the USA would need more support in handling its flow of tourists. According to Encarnacion, this led to “a popular petition that gathered 600,000 signatures and was endorsed by 900 nongovernment organizations, including the Catholic Church.”
Now Pedro Sanchez’s article has come. In a tiny article in the January 29 issue of the New York Times, the issue was raised by an author named Jose Bautista and more recently by Pedro Sanchez, the Prime Minister of Spain.
It wasn’t, however, much different from what we could have had here. You would have had to do through a process whereby you would essentially have to show that you were a “good citizen.” That should mean identifying issues like paying taxes, having employment, raising a family, owning a home and having no criminal record. Those with criminal records would be exported.
This is what we could have done in the US.
What happens next?
For Spain, this wasn’t easy. The third largest party in Spain now is the VOX party which has been pushing against immigration. Yet immigration is needed. Sanchez says, for example, “Spain is booming. For three years running, we have had the largest-growing economy among Europe’s largest countries. We have created nearly one of every three new jobs across the European Union, and our unemployment rate has fallen below 10 percent for the first time in nearly two decades.”
He continues by adding, “We, as Western nations, must choose between becoming closed and impoverished societies or open and prosperous ones. Growth or retreat. Those are the two words before us.”
Spain is actually ahead of us. Those tourist numbers make it clear. Those many Spaniards who signed the petition were essential. What are we going to do when someone looks our growth rate – 1.58 percent – and asks us. What will we do now that we’ve driven the migrants out of our country? Will we be “closed and impoverished societies or open and prosperous.”
Editor’s Note: The above guest column was penned by New Mexico-based writer Morgan Smith. Smith writes on border issues and can be reached at Morgan-smith@comcast.net
