“Some say we have gone too far, that we are going against the current. But I would like to ask you: when did the recognition of rights become something radical? When did empathy become something exceptional? Half a million people with whom we live every day, at the market, on the bus, at our children’s school. People who take care of our parents, work in the fields, who have built, hand in hand with us, the progress of our country.”
On 2nd February, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez gave residency documents to half a million migrants, showing us a different world that might—just might—be possible.
He went against (far-)right policies, populist approaches and racist rhetoric, clashed with prevailing opinions, and presented an approach that propaganda has kept on the margins. Namely, how immigration can be transformed from a “problem” into a lever for economic recovery, growth and demographic survival in an ageing Europe.
In this same moment, this dark period, we remain silently committed to the wrong side of history. From Trump’s ICE to Plevris’s Coast Guard, our states coordinate in an unspoken conspiracy. The debate around immigration has been turned into a tool of political polarisation. Terms that would have caused public shock a few years ago are today treated as a natural part of political vocabulary. The state suspends or suppresses rights in the name of necessity, pushbacks are christened “protection” and murders become “self-defence”.
“Order” and “security” and “protecting the social fabric” are the slogans driving the “need for stricter borders”, turning our seas day by day into vast cemeteries. The tragedy of Chios, like Pylos, like Rhodes, like so many other known and unknown stories that passed or didn’t pass through our feeds, that became or didn’t become part of mainstream news coverage, don’t shake us. They’re defence in a war against a common enemy for states: migrants.
The decision announced in early February 2026 by the Spanish Prime Minister provides that those who can prove they resided in Spain for at least five months before the end of 2025 and have no criminal record can apply for residence and work permits with the possibility of renewal. This wasn’t the first time Sánchez took a different stance on immigration.
One of his first moves after becoming Prime Minister in 2018 was announcing that Spain would welcome the 630 migrants aboard the rescue ship Aquarius, whom Italy and Malta had refused entry. Speaking to the Spanish parliament in 2024, he said the country had to choose between being “an open and prosperous country or a closed and poor country”.
Welcoming migrants, he said, wasn’t just a matter of human dignity. It was the only realistic way to develop the economy and maintain the welfare state in a country with one of the lowest birth rates in the European Union. “Throughout history, immigration has been one of the great factors in the development of states, whilst hatred and xenophobia have been and continue to be their greatest destroyers.”
And if all this seems “radical” and “extreme” today, let’s ask ourselves: How was the modern world built? Not with walls and fences, not with closed and “pure” nations, but with population movements and exchanges, waves of migrants, intermixing. States that today wag their fingers about “legality”, “national security” and “order” are nothing but creations of mass migration, colonialism and violent displacement of other peoples. Because, as Billie Eilish said from the Grammy stage: “no one is illegal on stolen land”.
