Before giving way to the presentation of the latest Immigration report of the Disensors Foundation, the Think Tank of the extreme right presided by Santiago Abascal and to which millions of euros have diverted, Vox deputy José María Figaredo wanted to emphasize an alleged quality of the document: “All the data used are public. It is a very objective report”. The first pages of the study, which claims to disassemble immigration to the payment of pensions, reiterates that all its analysis is based on “empirical data”.
While its writing seeks to appear an academic style, its interior hides a methodology loaded with errors, difficult data and a selection of little rigorous information with the objective of launching their racist thesis: immigrants are a burden for the welfare state because most charge little. Because they are poor.
To achieve this conclusion, the Foundation uses a simple methodology, no formulas elaborated with various parameters, common in the type of European studies on which the Disensors Foundation ensures based. He think tank Linked to Vox, from various sources, it collects public spending data in certain areas in 2022 (health, security, transport, etc.) and divides it among the total Spanish population. This makes several simulations of an immigrant contribution throughout his work life, for which he calculates the contributions of a series of type cases using the average salary of several assumptions, but all revolve on a single profile: “An African man” (20,060 euros) or “An African woman” (14,259).
With this, the report concludes that “an immigrant begins to have a positive net contribution when his salary is 45,150 euros per year.” And, since most do not charge that salary, Vox says they “don't compensate.”
The methodology, in addition to utilitarian, leaves an important crack that demonstrates the lack of rigor. According to its calculations, the immigrant population would not contribute to the welfare state, but the majority of the Spanish population would not, since its average salary for the year of 2022 was around 27,000 euros, far from the 45,150 euros for which it begins to “compensate”, according to the DisENSSEO Foundation.
Faced with the results of the Vox Think Tank, the studies of the European Commission, the Airef and the Bank of Spain affirm the opposite: Spain needs 300,000 migrant workers a year, until 2050, to sustain the welfare state. The analysis of international organizations such as the European Central Bank, the International Labor Organization or the International Monetary Fund have indicated the key role that immigration for economic growth. According to the Ministry of Migration, the migrant population currently contributes 10% of social security income and only represents 1% of the expense.
The errors of the report methodology show the manipulation of its results. These are the keys that evidences this lack of reliability, according to the analysis of four experts in the sociological and economic study of immigration, consulted by eldiario.es.
Non -representative assumptions
The dissent report is based on “simulations” created from profiles of foreign workers to calculate whether their net contribution throughout their lives is positive or negative. But, instead of using profiles of different nationalities that represent immigration, choose one: “African man” and “African woman”, despite the fact that most foreign citizens who reside in Spain are not Africans, but only represent 19% of the total. The largest group is the one from Latin America, followed by Europe and, thirdly, Africa.
According to the report, the example of the “African immigrant” stands out in its simulations because the main birth nationality of the foreign population residing in Spain is Moroccan. This data is true, but only represents 14% of the totality of immigration, so the experts consulted point out that it is not a simulation. To calculate the expense of an African family -the only example of an immigrant family -applies a stereotyped situation: the woman stops working after the birth of the child.
The experts consulted by Eldiario.es indicate the selected assumptions as the main feature that demonstrates the lack of rigor of the report. “Exact Net Contribution figures are presented (-158.044, -422,946, -1.496.502 €), but they are based on hypothetical assumptions and not on observed empirical data. There is no statistical support that supports that these vital trajectories faithfully represent reality,” says a source linked to the data analysis of the data on immigration of the immigration of the Ministry of Migration.
Another immigration expert, an advisor to international organizations, argues that the assumptions of simulations “are rigid and unrealistic.” He considers that “they deny social mobility, they do not contemplate the best performance of the second generations, they do not attend the dynamism of the pension system, etc …”.
The selection of these profiles does not respond to a serious analysis, according to the experts consulted, but seeks to reinforce the racist discourse of Vox. “It only has one purpose: to alert blacks and Arabs,” says Gonzalo Fanjul, researcher on migrations and development in Isglobal and the Porcause Foundation.
Inflated expense: 90 years?
Experts not only indicate the manipulative nature of the selected profiles and the lack of dynamism in the simulations of the study, they also point to another parameter introduced by the Ultra Foundation that manipulates the result, multiplying the alleged public spending in an exponential way: the life expectancy introduced.
Each and every one of the simulations on which the report is based on the assumption that the immigrant lives and charges a pension up to 90 years, which far exceeds 83 years of life expectancy recorded in 2022 (the year from which the report data is extracted).
And the return rate?
Beyond that gap in life expectancy in Spain, the methodology does not have a fundamental factor when talking about immigration: the return rate. None of the simulations introduce the possibility of the worker's return to his country, which could assume, depending on his nationality and the quotation time in Spain, stop receiving the pension, so that the data would be very different.
Disensus defends that, “even if these immigrants return to their countries of origin when they retire, they will continue to receive a Spanish Social Security pension.” But it is not entirely true: not all foreign workers have that right, but depends on the existence of a bilateral agreement with their country of origin. This agreement does exist with some representative nationalities of immigration towards Spain (such as the Venezuelan, Colombian, English or Moroccan) but not with all nationalities.
“They put some examples that demographically do not exist, because the life expectancy of a Spaniard does not reach 90 years. Those thresholds are so striking. They seek that more bulky deficits are achieved,” says Héctor onion, an expert sociologist in CSIC immigration.
Utilitarianism
The document has a marked utilitarian character of immigration, in which only the immigrant who charges more than 45,000 euros is “compensated”, but does not take into account the characteristics of the labor market on which the document is prepared, in which the majority of Spaniards do not charge that average amount throughout their work life and in which the foreign population tends to occupy positions for which it is overwhelmed.
“The migrants in Spain have greater training than that required by the jobs they occupy. It is not that they are poorly prepared, but that the offers of the Spanish labor market are of little qualification,” recalls one of the experts consulted.
At the end of the presentation of the report, held in a Chamber of the Congress of Deputies, Eldiario.es approached Ricardo Ruiz de la Serna, head of dissent studies. Given the impossibility of asking questions during the act, this medium asked if the deportation of millions of immigrants raised by Vox would allow the maintenance of pensions. “I don't know. That is not the object of the study,” he settled.