Spain’s prime minister has defended his government’s plan to grant legal status to undocumented residents in an exchange with Elon Musk on X, telling the billionaire “Mars can wait. Humanity can’t”.
The plan approved Tuesday by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s leftist government could regularise around 500,000 undocumented workers, in a break with harsher policies seen elsewhere in Europe.
Musk posted a link on X – which he owns – to a post by notorious far-right influencer Ian Miles Cheong who called the plan “electoral engineering” along with the comment “Wow”.
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“The logic is simple: legalise half a million people, fast-track them to citizenship (which takes as little as two years for many), and you’ve effectively imported a massive, loyal voting bloc that’s indebted to the left,” Cheong wrote in the post which has had nearly 12 million views.
READ ALSO: Spain’s opposition accuses PM of using migrant regularisation to gain voters
Sánchez hit back at Musk, responding to the billionaire’s post on X late on Thursday with the message: “Mars can wait. Humanity can’t”.
Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX is developing the mammoth Starship – the world’s largest and most powerful rocket – as part of his vision to take humans to Mars.
Sánchez argues immigrants are key to Spain’s economy, which expanded 2.8 percent last year — more than twice the average expected in the entire eurozone.
Q&A: How Spain’s mass regularisation of undocumented migrants will work
With Spain facing an ageing population and low birth rate, Sanchez says immigrants help sustain the workforce and maintain the pension system.
The main opposition conservative Popular Party (PP) and far-right Vox have lashed out at the government, saying the regularisation will encourage more illegal immigration.
READ ALSO: Most undocumented migrants in Spain not Africans arriving on boats
