01-07-2025
Vox calls for mass deportations and Spanish citizenship audit for foreigners
'By 2045, we Spaniards will be a minority in our own country".
This unreferenced statement by Vox MP Carlos Hernández Quero encapsulates the fears and driving force of the new policies of Spain's far-right party as it presented its new proposal for its housing and economic programme at a public event on Sunday June 29th.
Even though most would argue that nationality, race and ethnicity are not central to the country's property crisis and economic issues, Hernández Quero argued that "immigrants do not contribute to the welfare state" and that their presence is "altering the national identity".
Based on these opinions, the new manifesto for the party headed by Santiago Abascal calls for all once-undocumented migrants who have been given residency by both the right-wing Popular Party and the Socialist Party while they were in power to be "deported en masse" from Spain.
In their words, "reverse all the regularisations of illegal immigrants carried out by the two-party system". This would be done without due process, as is happening in the United Stated under the presidency of Donald Trump.
Such an act, prohibited by Spanish and international law, would force more than 1 million people to have to leave the country.
Furthermore, Vox's updated programme has called for "auditing the granting of Spanish nationality to see how many should be withdrawn".
Despite the fact that Spanish law only allows citizenship to be revoked in specific cases, Vox's argument is that in recent years Spanish citizenship was just been "given away" in many cases.
The report states that in 1996 the foreign population in Spain was 1 percent of the total, but today it exceeds 20 percent.
This is incorrect as the latest data from the National Statistics Institute (INE), corresponding to the first quarter of this year, indicates that there are 6.9 million foreigners in Spain, equivalent to only 14.1 percent of the population, not 20 percent.
However, Spain does have 9.4 million inhabitants who born outside of Spain, representing 19.3 percent of the population, but this includes almost 3 million Spaniards born abroad, which is potentially what Vox is referring to.
Clearly, in their eyes, these naturalised citizens aren't truly Spanish, no matter how long they've lived in the country or how integrated they are.
"Some of those who are so concerned about the end of the world, about climate change, should be more concerned about the end of Spain due to demographic replacement," Hernández Quero stated during the public presentation.
The Vox representative also blamed immigrants for the low wages and precarious jobs in the Spanish labour market and for "having a direct and harmful impact in the form of insecurity in neighbourhoods".
He even pointed the finger at foreigners for rising rents and the lack of housing in the country. "They don't pay our pensions or save our welfare state," he said, adding that migrants allegedly cost the Spanish State "more than €30 billion a year", without giving his sources.
This comes at a time when migrants have been lauded internationally as the fuel powering Spain's thriving economy, with almost all new self-employed workers being foreign.
This isn't the first time Vox have proposed tougher citizenship rules for foreigners, having previously said the wait for citizenship via residency should be lengthened from ten to fifteen years, it's called for nationality applications from those with criminal records to be banned and wants dual nationality to be banned for all foreigners, including Latin Americans.
Vox is not the only European party to have suggested taking away the legal status of immigrants and revoking citizenship.
In early 2025, the Swedish government planned to make it possible to revoke citizenship, but only for gang members.
The first Global State of Citizenship report, by the Global Citizenship Observatory (GLOBALCIT) at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, which analysed citizenship laws in 191 countries found that the process of naturalisation is becoming 'increasingly fragile'
Researchers found that "with the growing number of armed conflicts and incidence of terrorism worldwide, many countries have introduced provisions for withdrawing the citizenship of a person on the basis of national security grounds'.
Over a third of countries, including many European ones, 'can now strip a person of their citizenship when their actions are seen as disloyal or threatening to state security,' the report says, and the trend has been expanding.
According to Vox's own policy agenda, the number one priority in its immigration agenda is the deportation of all illegal immigrants.
