Saving Spain
The Great Replacement—and Potential Remigration Solutions
Spain has given the West a great deal. Explorers like Christopher Columbus and Juan Ponce de Leon marked the spread of European Civilisation to the American continent(s) and the Caribbean. Many of the great Western nations like the United States would not be what they are today without the adventures, conquests, and civilising missions of the Spaniards.
Today, however, the greatest concern of the Spanish people is not in visiting foreign lands and instead revolves around the struggle of the Spanish people to remain a majority and political priority in their own homeland.
Before continuing it is a necessity to acknowledge that modern Spain is home to numerous ethnic groups aside from the mainline Spanish. The Galicians, Leonese, Catalan, Aragonese, Basque and other peoples also have their homelands within the bounds of modern Spain. For the sake of this article any European people native to the area of modern Spain will be referred to as Spanish. Many of these peoples, referred to as “nationalities” in Spain, have autonomy with the Kingdom of Spain and if possible within the constitutional structure of the country they should implement their own regional remigration policies if possible. Recently the autonomous community (nation) of Catalonia (the homeland of the Catalans) was granted powers to detain and deport “irregular migrants”. This is a power every nation in Spain should demand, along with others.
These changes and others are manifestly necessary to reverse the demographic replacement of the native Spaniards. In 1991 the foreign-born population of Spain just 0.91% and in 2002 the figure of foreigners remained modest at just 4.24% of the population or about 1.738 million people. In just 10 years the foreign-born population had expanded to 13.45% (2012). The latest government figures for 2025 show that the foreign-born population of Spain now exceeds 9.5 million people or about 20% of the population. 6.6 million of these individuals do not yet possess Spanish citizenship. Figures such as these are concerning and as ever they do not tell the full story.
The Spanish government does not provide official statistics or even broad estimates for the second-generation immigrant population. There are some estimates that can be used, though. Data constructed by a European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Bank analyst estimates the second-generation immigrant population to stand around 5%.
This would put the broader non-Spanish population at roughly 25% of the population of Spain. Furthermore the analyst projects that by 2039 roughly 40% of the population of Spain will be immigrants and the children of immigrants. In certain areas of the country such as Madrid and Barcelona the data analyst’s projections show that the non-Spanish population will exceed 50% by 2039.
To quote the author “This represents one of the most rapid demographic transformations in modern European History”.
Manifestly, this demographic transformation represents a threat to Spain as a democratic nation-state established by the Spanish people as a vehicle for their welfare and interests. The autonomous communities of Spain established for the native European peoples will de facto dissolve against a tide of immigrants and their descendants who will demand political power and recognition on par with the native Western peoples.
All of this data suggests that the native Spanish population of the Kingdom of Spain is currently some 75%, about 36.86 million people, and roughly 21-points lower than in 2002 when native Spaniards were 95.76% of the country’s population and numbered 39.3 million individuals. Spain’s demographic future went from secure to perilous in the space of a single generation.
In addition to consecutive waves of mass immigration, Spain has also hemorrhaged its native population. According to Spain’s Instituto Nacional de Estadistica (INE) more than 3 million Spaniards reside abroad as of January 1, 2025. Just over 1.13 million of these Spaniards reside in Europe and another 1.805 million across Latin America. A stagnating economy and lack of job opportunities combined with mass immigration has driven an entire generation of young Spaniards away from home with the average age of those departing being between 28 and 35 years old. These are the Spaniards who would otherwise be marrying, having their first child or two, and establishing themselves within their communities, instead they are leaving the country in search of better economic opportunity and roof to live under. Spain has one of if not the worst housing crises in Europe behind perhaps only Ireland. Rents are doubling, stock is low, and many families are spending in excess of 40% of their income for a place to live, and yet mass immigration continues!
Reversing Mass Immigration to Spain:
Spain is in a much more fortunate position than many Western societies, however. Of the more than 9 million non-Spaniards in the country roughly 6.5 million do no yet have Spanish citizenship. Currently 1.6 million of these individuals are citizens of other European Union states and therefore enjoy the legal right to reside in Spain for as long as they please, but this does leave just shy of 4 million people who could be removed from the country by simply allowing their visas/residency to expire and then sending them home. Many of these immigrants will of course have permanent residency status in Spain, but this is due to an oddity particular to Spanish law that does not mark an immigrant as an illegal for simply failing to renew their five-year residency permit. In effect, any five-year visa in Spain is a permanent residency permit. This provision must be changed in Spanish law and should include a temporary provision that requires a review and renewal of all current visa holders who are not married or a partner to a person with Spanish citizenship.
Assuming even three million foreign visa holders could be gradually removed from the country this would increase the native Spanish share of the population from 75% to 80%.
This will not be enough, however. Spain will need to revise its laws around denaturalisation. Currently denaturalisation for a criminal offense is limited to those people who lied or used fraud in the acquisition of their Spanish citizenship, but these laws are too limiting in the age of mass immigration. Spain must amend these laws to allow for the denaturalisation of any foreign-born individual, dual citizen, or person who qualifies for another citizenship if they commit crimes in Spain. Non-Spaniards who cannot meet Spanish expectations for civil behaviour and good neighbourliness should be removed for their crimes. It is likely that such changes to Spanish law would result in a great volume of denaturalisations as organised crime is quite a serious issue in Spain. In mid-2024 Spanish police were able to take down an organised criminal enterprise smuggling illegal immigrants into Europe along the Spanish coastline and more broadly crimes such as financial crime, human smuggling, and sexual exploitation have become large and profitable criminal enterprises in Spain. To quote the Global Organized Crime Index’s 2023 report:
“The criminal ecosystem in Spain is dominated by foreign criminal groups, mainly of Italian, Albanian, Russian, Nigerian, Serbian, Turkish, Mexican and Dutch origin, all of which have a sustained presence in the country.”
With a foreign-born population only slightly smaller than the United Kingdom’s it is likely that 1 to 1.2 million people of foreign birth in Spain have some form of criminal background that would make them eligible for denaturalisation and deportation to their country of origin.
Finally, there remains the absolute necessity of voluntary paid remigration for those immigrants and their descendants living in Spain who are unable to integrate and find themselves reliant upon Spanish taxpayers to survive. Unfortunately I was unable to find exact polling or indirect polling on the number of foreigners who would be willing to leave the country, but this does not mean the idea is not worth pursuing given the numbers we have previously highlighted for countries such as the United Kingdom, United States of America, Austria, and Sweden. Clearly a great many ‘settled’ immigrants and their decedents wish to leave the West if they can maintain their lifestyles abroad. For this reason the Spanish government should redirect funding from areas such as the Asylum, Migration, and Integration Fund (AMIF) and construct a Swedish-style package that will pay non-integrated migrants to voluntary return to their country of origin.
Spain remains fortunate that its experiment with mass immigration has only resulted in a large non-citizen foreigner population. Reversing the Great Replacement in Spain will be a modest affair compared to Britain, Germany, or America.
Support White Papers:
White Papers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Find us on X, Telegram and YouTube.
Contact us: info@whitepaperspolicy.org
Zelle: whitepapersinstitute@protonmail.com
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/wppi
Snail Mail: White Papers Policy, PO Box 192, Hancock, MD 21750
 | A guest post by
|