Many appreciate and many endorse the governmental solution that, in Spain, the constitutional system has validated and, obviously, its performance. However, in academic circles, international organizations, reference press (including Financial Times e The Economist) and until now, in the main agencies of ratingthere are no such contrasting assessments of the economic results achieved in recent years. And even, to a large extent, the factors that explain them. Spain has been the fastest growing European country for two years and is expected to continue to be so. GDP growth last year was 3.5% (and the OECD recently set its forecasts for the next year at 2.6%), a very different panorama from that offered by Germany, France and Italy. Who would have thought that the Spanish economy, which is not even part of the trio of largest, could account for 40% of growth in the euro zone – as happened last year and the Sanchez government highlights? “For every ten euros of European growth, we contribute four”… is a message that is difficult to replicate.
No matter how different there are in the narratives, in the explanations there is always a large place for “migratory dynamism”. It was through this route that Spain recorded a strong increase in the population of working age (more than 5% in recent years), with direct repercussions on consumption, investment and revenue, tax and otherwise. Analyzing the period, Juan Carlos Lazaro, professor at IE University, is one of the many who, among the various factors, points first to the “dynamization of the labor market”, highlighting “the strong increase in population, with the arrival in three years of two million immigrants of working age and with a good level of employability”. This with the relevant particularity that more than 70% of migrants are of Ibero-American origin. Leaving the details of this to others immigration-led growthlet’s focus on the result: faced with threatening demographic aging, Spain reaps multiple benefits from the increase in the working-age population.
It is unlikely that anything similar will be promoted by the new legislative design for immigration, which recently moved, for the second time, from S. Bento to Belém. Apart from the negative effects that will be added to it through the proposed law on nationality, which will deepen differences in relation to Spanish law, the blind restrictive vision, the historical error committed in relation to Lusophony, inadequate solutions and, in some cases, very defective, at decisive points for integration. Without forgetting, also, the constitutional fragility that some of the new formulations, introduced as a purge of previous flaws, continue to suffer from. The President may decide – or not – to point it out again. But the constitutionalist is well aware that, if the option is not to appeal to the Court, disturbing news could arrive later, during successive inspections, which, in that case, he would only be postponing.
This is not a pessimistic look at an apparently irremediable Iberian divergence. It is simply the perception that serious changes will be necessary in the framework now resulting from the PSD-Chega agreement if greater convergence in results is to be ensured.
Jurist, former minister.
Write without applying the new Spelling Agreement