Vox leader Santiago Abascal stated on Monday that in the regions where his party governs, public funds earmarked for migration policies will be used to finance “return tickets” and repatriations of undocumented immigrants.
During a speech in Motril (Granada) at a campaign event, Abascal pointed out that in the regional governments where Vox is in coalition with the PP – such as in Extremadura, Aragón or Castilla y León – they will rebel against the migrant amnesty by using state-provided immigrant integration and support funds to pay for flights back to their countries of origin.
The Vox leader, who described the migrant regularisation as “massive” and “illegal”, criticised the central government for defending the idea that those who enter Spain by boat or by “jumping the fences” of Ceuta and Melilla should have the same rights as Spaniards.
Spain recently began the process of giving residency and work rights to more than 500,000 undocumented migrants already in the country, which in turn sees them pay into Spain’s social security coffers and pay tax, rather than working in the black without welfare rights.
Think tanks estimate that 86 percent of undocumented migrants getting residency are Latin Americans and not North African or sub-Saharan migrants as Abascal alluded to. Most of these Latinos flew to Spain by plane and overstayed their tourist visa.
Nevertheless, the Vox leader argued that “there’s not room for everyone here; Spain is for Spaniards and for people who have been working and paying taxes for a long time.”
It is true that Spain has seen a significant increase in its foreign population in recent years. More than two million migrants arrived in Spain between 2023 and 2024, new data has shown.
Without immigration, Spain’s population would be in steep decline, given the very low birth rate among Spaniards (1.1) and that 20 percent of Spanish nationals are over the age of 65, a percentage that could be 30 by 2050.
READ ALSO: What would Spain be like with fewer immigrants?
For Abascal, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has encouraged a “migratory invasion”, asserting that locals are being discriminated against in access to social assistance and public housing.
This is why Vox and the conservative PP recently agreed to the ‘national priority’ pact as a means of promoting a ‘Spaniards first’ approach when it comes to state aid in the regions in which they govern.
READ MORE: What is the Spanish right’s ‘national priority’ policy for Spaniards?
The Spanish Socialist Party considers the pact by the right-wing bloc “unfair and illegal” and said that it risks creating “first and second-class citizens”.
Abascal also drew attention to a recent crime case, claiming that politicians and journalists had tried to hide the nationality of the man who murdered a woman with a large knife in Barcelona on Saturday.
“We’ve seen how the only gang of rapists whose faces we see are those of Spaniards. But there are other gangs everywhere and we don’t know any of their faces. We don’t know who they are, where they are, or if they’ve been convicted or deported,” Abascal stressed in allusion to foreign criminals.
The Vox leader emphasised that Pedro Sánchez “is willing to steal democracy from the Spanish people” and “the 2027 elections” through the regularisation of migrants.
This theory shared in right-wing circles suggests that Sánchez’s government wants to regularise more than half a million migrants so they can claim Spanish citizenship quickly and vote for him, therefore keeping him in power.
Although it is true that Latin Americans can apply for Spanish citizenship after two years of legal residency in Spain, this wouldn’t be in time for the 2027 general election.
In 2025, Vox shared a song on their social media channels titled Billete de Vuelta (Return Ticket). The video’s animation shows airplanes flying to Morocco, which is labelled as Jovenlandia (Young Land), what the Spanish right says to mock the alleged reluctance of the left to publish the country of origin of criminals.
