'We owe a lot to them': Spain's PM highlights immigration benefits
Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Wednesday highlighted the benefits brought by immigrants during a visit to Mauritania where he spoke after anti-immigrant unrest in a Spanish town.
Sánchez, stood alongside Mauritania's President Mohamed Ould Cheikh El Ghazouani, told reporters that Spain and other rich countries owe a lot to migrants for their development.
Mauritania has however become a key staging post for undocumented migrants who take a dangerous sea route from West Africa to Europe, with many heading for Spain.
"Today, the progress and good economic situation of Spain owes a lot to the contribution made by immigration, to the people who have come to develop their life plans there," Sánchez said.
The Spanish leader called for closer cooperation with countries like Mauritania "to guarantee migration that is safe, regular, organised, that mutually benefits our societies".
He spoke as Spanish authorities seek to calm several nights of troubles in the town of Torre Pacheco where migrants have been the target of violence since an attack on a 68-year-old man last week. Spain's far-right has seized on the unrest to call for deportations of migrants.
Sánchez has defended the role of migration and in August last year went to three West African nations, including Mauritania, seeking to develop "circular migration" that brings trained workers that Spain needs for its economy.
Thousands of would-be migrants have died in recent years seeking to make the sea trip from Mauritania and other North African states to Spain and other European Mediterranean countries.
According to the Spanish charity Caminando Fronteras, nearly 10,500 people died at sea in 2024 alone. Some 46,800 African migrants arrived in Spain's Canary islands in 2024, according to official figures, though numbers have fallen this year.
Spanish and Mauritanian officials on Wednesday signed four accords on transport and infrastructure, welfare, cybersecurity and national parks, the Spanish government said in a statement.
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'Franco did it': Five quirky ways the dictator shaped modern Spain
With the 50th anniversary of Franco's death this year, there has unsurprisingly been quite a bit of talk about the dictator's legacy and his impact on Spain. Much of it, of course, is critical. However, some Spaniards, especially younger males, view the dictatorship with increasingly rose-tinted glasses and give examples of the supposed positives Franco did for the country. Often these are untrue, such as the widely-shared claim that Franco created the Spanish social security system, that he made Sunday a rest day for workers or that he set up the country's pension system. However, despite that, to say that the man who ruled Spain for decades didn't have a huge impact on the country would also be absurd. Despite the fact there's a tendency among some foreigners - including foreign correspondents and historians - to see Franco in absolutely everything, it's fair to say that in some specific ways, the dictator's legacy does live on to this day. Everything happens later in the day because of Franco Spain is in the wrong time zone. The country is geographically in line with the UK and Portugal. It makes sense, then, that Spain was in the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) zone until around 75 years ago. But that changed during the Second World War. With the country ravaged by its own recent Civil War - in which Franco's victory was heavily supported by Hitler - Franco felt obliged to make a gesture of some sort. Although ultimately remaining neutral in the war, he decided to show his support for Hitler by agreeing to put Spain's clocks forward by an hour in an act of solidarity with Nazi Germany. Spain has remained in the Central European Time zone ever since, in line with countries as far east as Poland. But Franco's decision all those years ago isn't just a quirk of Spanish history, or testament to the extent to which the legacy of that period still looms over Spanish society. 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The dictatorship liberalised the economy and invested heavily in promoting tourism abroad as a means of whitewashing the regime, turning its back on the Catholic, traditionalist sector of society which shunned the idea of free-thinking northern European tourists gracing Spain's beaches in bikinis. The regime opened its borders without checks or visa requirements, the peseta was deliberately devalued to make it cheaper for foreigners to spend their holidays in Spain, and legislation fixed the price hotels and restaurants could charge in order to keep them low, all factors that planted the seeds for the 'anything goes' tourism model. In fact, two of the popular tourism slogans of the time were Pase sin llamar ('Come in without knocking') and 'Spain is different', written in English. From 1960 to 1970, the number of international tourists quadrupled from 6.1 million to 24.1 million. 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Incredibly, in 1950 only one in twenty people in Madrid or Barcelona owned their own homes, but by 2007 the Ministry of Housing estimated that 87 percent of Spanish households owned at least one home. José Luis Arrese, the first Housing Minister in Spanish history, told the Francoist Parliament in the 1950s that 'We want a society of owners, not proletarians.' With the great migration ongoing, estimates suggest that around 12 million Spaniards (roughly 40 percent of the population at the time) moved house between 1951 and 1975. The Franco regime discouraged renting a 1954 limited rent law enabled the construction of millions of subsidised homes. Then the real construction boom broke out: between 1961 and 1975, four million flats were built, often in the classic Spanish apartment block style. To top it all off, the Banco Hipotecario de España was created to compensate private banks granting mortgages to the working classes flowing into Spanish cities. 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Local Spain
a day ago
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What's caused the recent anti-migrant unrest in Spain?
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Local Spain
a day ago
- Local Spain
'We owe a lot to them': Spain's PM highlights immigration benefits
Immigration Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Wednesday highlighted the benefits brought by immigrants during a visit to Mauritania where he spoke after anti-immigrant unrest in a Spanish town. Sánchez, stood alongside Mauritania's President Mohamed Ould Cheikh El Ghazouani, told reporters that Spain and other rich countries owe a lot to migrants for their development. Mauritania has however become a key staging post for undocumented migrants who take a dangerous sea route from West Africa to Europe, with many heading for Spain. "Today, the progress and good economic situation of Spain owes a lot to the contribution made by immigration, to the people who have come to develop their life plans there," Sánchez said. The Spanish leader called for closer cooperation with countries like Mauritania "to guarantee migration that is safe, regular, organised, that mutually benefits our societies". He spoke as Spanish authorities seek to calm several nights of troubles in the town of Torre Pacheco where migrants have been the target of violence since an attack on a 68-year-old man last week. Spain's far-right has seized on the unrest to call for deportations of migrants. Sánchez has defended the role of migration and in August last year went to three West African nations, including Mauritania, seeking to develop "circular migration" that brings trained workers that Spain needs for its economy. Thousands of would-be migrants have died in recent years seeking to make the sea trip from Mauritania and other North African states to Spain and other European Mediterranean countries. According to the Spanish charity Caminando Fronteras, nearly 10,500 people died at sea in 2024 alone. Some 46,800 African migrants arrived in Spain's Canary islands in 2024, according to official figures, though numbers have fallen this year. Spanish and Mauritanian officials on Wednesday signed four accords on transport and infrastructure, welfare, cybersecurity and national parks, the Spanish government said in a statement.
