Spain’s Former Empire Might Just Save Them

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Spain has just won the World Cup. So I thought I would take this as an opportunity to discuss the thing about Spain that sets it apart from really every other country in the modern world. It’s pro-immigration to a huge degree, even more so than Canada. If you can believe that the Canadians have actually clamped down immigration quite a bit in the last three years, but in Spain the doors are wide open and if anything, becoming wider. 

Spain is a country that was facing demographic collapse in the aftermath of the dictatorships of the 60s, 70s and 80s. Spain opened up to the world, became a democracy and started to industrializing and joined the European Union. And in doing so, we saw one of the fastest moves of people from rural areas to urban areas. And as is normal when you do that, your birth rate collapses. 

So it went from having something significantly higher than the global average to one of the lowest in the world and under a decade. And then it has stayed there ever since. Which means it’s not just a country that is aging. It’s aging very, very, very, very rapidly. And because when people moved into the cities, they moved into tight, constrained conditions, even though the wealth level of the average Spaniard has gone up quite a bit in the last 40 years, the amount of room that they have has not. 

And so people are not having kids. The only solution that Spain has found is immigration. And in doing so, Spain has seen its population increase by about 5 million to roughly 47 million today. And its average age has kind of stabilized in the mid 40s. It’s about a 44 right now. They have brought in in that population about 2.25 million people as new citizens. 

And they’ve had two rounds of amnesties to take illegal migrants and make them naturalized so that they’re legal. The first round a few years ago was a half a million people. They’re doing another round right now that will probably be at least as large, which makes Spain among the Western countries today by far the most pro-immigration and arguably the most pro-immigration by the numbers in the world now. 

Is this solving the problem? It’s dressing a lot of it. Labor costs have really calmed down, and as the population starts to age, they really need those people to help with things like health care and construction. But just because Spain has been able to do it doesn’t mean that everyone else can. The reason is really simple. Spain used to have an empire, and that empire is packed full of young people. 

So when you look at the Spanish speaking world, which is basically the entirety of the Western Hemisphere, minus the United States and Canada, you’ve got a huge pool of people who, from a cultural point of view, already speak the language, even if it’s a different accent and some different pronunciations, and that are willing to move across the world in order to move into what is now, honestly, a second or third world country. 

That is something that cannot be replicated for most countries in the world. I mean, look at Poland, for example, which came in from the cold and industrialized about a decade after Spain, Poland used to have an empire as well, but it dates back almost a thousand years, whereas Spain’s is much more recent. And the countries that it’s settled are actually settled with people who used to be Spaniards. 

So the cultural gulf that immigrants have to cross in order to move to Spain is not nearly as big, and it’s not nearly perceived as big by the Spaniards themselves either. Anyway, bottom line is, among all of the European Union countries, among all of the Western countries, Spain is the country that has become the poster child for how you can take integration and immigration and turn it into a national expansion and survival strategy. 

Whether or not anyone else can follow in their footsteps. Well, that’s a different question.