foreign you good afternoon we can start our conference thank you for being here in huge numbers i'm very pleased to introduce to you this conference we will listen to professor juan dolado he is a spanish professor he teaches as at the juan carlos cercero university in madrid and also at the european institute in fiasole florence he specialized in labor economy and specifically in econometric theories and he is specifically an expert of one of the topics which are uh and the focus of attention also here at the festival that is migration immigration and possible benefits deriving from migration so i'm very pleased to be here tonight with you to listen to professor dolado because he will provide us with very interesting data and evidence i have been working for some years now as a journalist in both italy and spain and so i have my own picture of the situation in the two countries in 2007 i went to el pais to work for el pais in spain and in those days we i witnessed the beginning of the trial uh against uh terrorists of the 2004 march uh terror attack which caused 193 casualties which is the which makes it the worst terror attack so far in europe it was a jihadist terror attack at the time we did not have the islamic state al qaeda though was there and the terror attack of the time was very similar to what we then saw in paris and brussels it was uh some it was violence against commuters against people moving towards the center of the capital and all for spain as a whole because you see madrid is the center of spain and at the center of spain so due to the high number of victims and due to the devastating effects uh produced by the terror attack people talked a lot about it and it doubts also had an influence on the voting outcome because elections were held after a few days so that was the case then and uh i was there when the trial started after three years i um therefore had the chance to focus on all the details and detailed information and specifically what caught my attention was the fact that these terrorists had planned ferociously the attack i thought that people would react in an xenophobic way and in a violent way but actually it was not so people were talking about personal and individual responsibilities the newspapers talked about individuals giving names surname and address and age so newspapers talked about individuals who had perpetrated the crime and they did not take on a racist attitude that was the attitude of the media and actually people followed suit or perhaps it was the other way around but also politicians voiced the very same type of attitude in that elections as i said told you were held after a few days but nobody thought of exploiting that situation and talk against islam so that was the case also in 2007 when the trial started so actually this is as i said was the general attitude and this is something that i noticed in the streets of madrid in the cafes of madrid i was moving to madrid at the time and i was also commuting in a way between italy bologna specifically and madrid in spain bologna actually is certainly not famous in italy for its extreme right wing attitude rather the opposite at the time though roberto calvaroli a parliament member of the legendary was organizing the mayale day the pig day in bologna and what he was organizing was a walk with his pig in the place where the administration of bologna had planned to build a mosque so there was a sharp contrast between the situation in italy and the triviality was happening in italy on the one hand and what was going on in spain that was really food for thought for me and then i saw that also in the following years and that was evidenced also during the economic crisis spain had a booming economy they were needing workers and labor coming also from other countries it was my case too and people could have decent jobs they could choose where to go and live in the in the city and they also could afford purchasing property and having a family so it was a good time for spain economically speaking and also psychologically speaking if i may add so because in those years people were gaining hold of the present time they were owners of their own present time after a long period decades before of course of dictatorship in spain so actually uh it was a joyful period but then something went wrong in 2008 the economic crisis was devastating in spain unemployment rate was huge and professor dolado will certainly comment upon that there were huge curbs in terms of the wages of civil servants but also welfare and education policies and several other things if you happen to know people who live in spain you certainly know what i'm talking about but even within and in the period of the economic crisis spain was different from other countries in several countries due to the crisis populism boomed and flourished uh taking on axinophobic attitude but spain did not do that new york times uh just a few days ago published an article and it was full of tables by the way but the point is that the article was about the right-wing movements in europe and measurement of the situation in several countries were given and different colors were given to extreme right-wing parties and right-wing parties and so on and so forth all countries had that type of experience but not spain in spain unemployment is still very high and there are huge economic issues and problems but that is not accompanied by the uh trends i told you and that goes also for an attitude towards migration in spain actually the opposite is true in that unemployment is very high but concern about migration is extremely low the borrow mesa what we call the barometer about concerns of uh people was published and 78 of the spaniards said that they are worried in relation to possible unemployment or being unemployed and then corruption was an issue but only three percent of people said migration is a problem and you see it you might object that it is due to the fact that there are just two political parties in spain but it is not so new parties have emerged podemos is one of them and so they do have a populist nuance to them because they exploit the discontent of people the malays which is present in uh in the society of spain so populism is present but this populism never actually translates into uh outright racism on the 26th of june there are general elections in spain and the electoral campaign is absolutely um free of these anti-migration uh our arguments and opinions and ideas which often we hear and listen to in in italy we often hear people say in italy that migrants come here and steal our own jobs and our places in kindergarten and in schools this is not happening in spain it has not happened so far in spain and this is what i wanted to tell you before giving the floor to professor dolado glacier militia it's a great pleasure being here so thanks to the organizers and thanks to all of you who have shown up at the this time of the evening so i i must confess i i didn't choose the topic of this of this talk when one of the organizers tinto boyeri called me up to see whether i i would like to give a talk he has he suggested topic and he thought exactly he used the same words that the lucia was was using what's going on in spain that immigration is not being seen as a problem as it's often the case in the rest of of europe even when you are undergoing a really bad situation so i thought it was a provoking theme and what i want to do in the remaining part of the of this talk is just to to share with you some sort of brainstorming about what i think could be the explanation and the what extent it can be extended to other cases and whether we can draw useful lessons especially for the current circumstances that the europe is undergoing okay so uh okay so the first thing uh just to to remark to highlight is that the spain is not part of the european swing to the to the stream right well here you have a graph uh where you can use in a gallop and other sources of political poles of electoral polls you can see the rise in opinion polls from january 2013 to may 2016 of different far-right parties in different parts of europe so starting the uh starting from poland where of course the pis is part of the current government to go into austria where of course a couple of weekends ago they almost had to choose a far right president to switzerland to derma to sweden and of course france netherlands well the only lesson to be drawn from this graph is that spain is not there okay um well no political party no major political party uh in spain uh neither in the previous general elections that took place last december nor in the in the forthcoming general elections will take take place in june after the lack of agreement to form a coalition uh exhibits any xenophobic attitudes or exhibits any anti-migration policies in there in in the party agendas again this is just a graph taken from the economies where you can see the the the trend in the advance of of the far right in in europe and as i said which are part of coalition governments or the sole uh party in the government in in some of these countries uh just to give you an idea of what's the importance of anti-migration of far-right parties in in in spain here you have the list of the eight parties which have anti-migration statements in the in the in their agendas uh in the 2015 general elections last december uh in the first row uh there are 350 seats in the spanish parliament and you have the number of seats there which is of course zero and in the second column you have the share of votes so basically there is no far right there is no anti-migration uh this is out of the of the spanish scenario in the history the recent history of democratic elections in spain since 1987 when democracy was restored only one party with anti-migration views one seat and that was a single seat from 1979 to 1982 particle puerta nueva which was a party formed by former franco's allies and yet despite not having far right parties spain at the beginning of the 21st century became the second country of destination in the oecd in terms of immigration influence so this is a graph where you have the the percentage of immigrants in oecd countries so oecd as country of destination from all over the world and of course the main county of destination this doesn't seem to work the first country of destination is obviously the united states but the second country destination above australia canada united kingdom etc is spain of course uh follow a little bit closely by italy so this is a representative here in 2004 about 10 of all immigrants arriving to the oecd went to spain okay so this of course implies that the the intensity of the migration influence to spain the migrate the arrival of migrants in spain is comparable uh to historical episodes like for instance what happened in greece after the end of the turkish greek war in at the beginning of the 20s where 1 million turkish greeks arrived to greece whose population at that time was 5 million so that was an increase all of a sudden increase in the population of almost 20 percent or the famous miami boat leaves coming from cuba the so-called marielitos a fleet of uh boats which arrive hundred 150 000 cubans arriving to the shores of miami all of a sudden in 1980 or more recently the arriving of jewish russians to israel in 1990 after the fall of the of the berlin wall which meant an increase in the population of almost 10 percent so here you have the immigrant shares in selected european countries including italy and what you can see is of course there is an upward trend said perhaps sorry except perhaps in in france in the rest of the countries you see an upward trend in the share of immigrants but the steepness of the increase in in in spain is uh doesn't have a any other it doesn't it's much larger than elsewhere including the uk so it is this huge survival of migrants which led to a large stock of foreign border population in a very few in a very short period of time over 10 years between 2000 and 2010 so the pink line in spain of course the starting point was less than one million foreign-born people living in spain and a few years in less than a decade it reached close to five and a half million so 4.5 million arrivals over that period very short period of what 10 years so basically almost half a million per year it's getting close to germany of course that's in rich germany which is a much larger country and then the number of foreign borns are is much larger but it's getting close and you can see as time goes by and we approach the period and the great of the great recession and in fact aftermath that the the the number of migrants in spain has remained high okay so that's something to take into into account uh well let's see i was uh mentioning this when you look at the natives attitudes toward migration what you see according for instance for to the european social service uh this is 2002 thousand and well and 12 is that the spain has one of the largest approval rates in in fact up to 2008 uh the beginning of the of the great recession it was the largest in europe uh and after even afterwards it's only second to some of the northern scandinavian countries so this happened even after one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in europe that lucia was also mentioning i didn't want to put any photograph to respect of course the dignity of the family who suffered there but there were bombings in four railway stations in madrid and almost 200 people killed on march 11 2004 are about 2 000 people injured uh the attacks were claimed by an al-qaeda cell and and that was really a big shock in terms of the threat of islamic terrorism and the possibility of mixing this up with muslim immigrants in spain and nothing happened okay so this is the graph that the lucia was mentioning before even after when you enter the the the the recession period uh after 2008 if you use foreign barometer if you look at the proportion of people who respond positive towards immigration the darker red ones are the the countries in which this response is lower so we know italy is of course among them france the czech republic hungary etc but spain and portugal are among those countries in which the proportion of people against immigration is below 50 the the the current figure in favor is about around 58 and this is 2016. so really not at the at the peak of economic growth that we saw in the in the in the previous decade so basically this is another graph which illustrates the the so-called spanish exception against the european social service and on the on the horizontal ages you have uh people have to classify the economic situation on a range of values from zero which is very bad to 10 which is good and here you have to again value the the contribution of immigrants to to the economy from zero to ten and what you see is of course most people in spain which is there value the economic situation this is 2012 this is just at the draft of the recession that's very bad in spain but it's one of the countries where the opinion in favor of migrants is is is larger okay so this is what i i i come to label the the spanish reception in that in that respect so for the rest of the talk i'll talk very briefly i'll develop briefly what are they what were the origins of this immigration boom which were the turning points uh in this immigration process what happened when when spain uh moved from from a big boom in spain it used to be called the bell epoch the period from 2000 to 2010 to the period of darkness you know and then i'll at the end of the day i'll i'll give you this uh sort of open brainstorming about my opinion which of course i'm happy to to discuss at length further on way when the questions arrive and what could be the potential explanation for this spanish exception okay so whenever there is a somebody moves when there is whenever there is immigration or immigration depending on the viewpoint of the country foreign or the country of destination that is what economists call a push and a pull effect so the push effect is something is not going well in your in your country of orient and therefore you look at an exit you look a way out of that the pool effect is something is going well in the country of destination and therefore you feel attracted okay and here as in many other cases there have been strong push and pull effects so as i'll develop later on understand later on fertility spain with italy is one of the countries with the lowest fertility rates in the world on the other hand is one of the countries as well within the olive belt the mediterranean area which has a higher life expectancy so this is a society which is progressively aging so of course this puts a lot of pressure on the pension system okay so that was the situation to start with then both italy spain and many other countries when they accessed the euro especially the southern mediterranean countries were countries which had a middle to high inflation but all of a sudden they were assimilated by the beauty financial markets to germany so whereas having high inflation if you remember the mortgage rates you were paying in the in in the mid 90s those were almost were two digits and all of a sudden we all became germans okay so the nominal interest rates fell down dramatically to three four percent so you figure in the next slide whereas inflation stayed relatively higher so that means that the real interest rate difference between the nominal interest rate that inflation fell down a lot so it was very cheap to take loans and invest so typically low real interest rates imply an investment boom so where did this investment go well spain has had an italy as well as i'll come about in a second is a are have labor markets which are heavily dualized so they there is a share of important share of precarious jobs the so-called temporary contracts which countries and then highly protected jobs so if you have an investment boom in this in these countries it cannot go unlike for instance what happened in finland or or what happening in some other of the scandinavian countries it cannot go into high return high-risk sectors so think of a computer sector computing sectors i.t sectors like nokia in finland etc why because these are high return potentially high return sectors but also entail a lot of risk so if typically to be successful you need several failures before so you have to pay a fortune as a compensations evidence pay as a dismissal compensations to your worker the first time you fail you never you never stand up so this means that in all these countries particularly in spain it was preferable to invest in mature sectors where you could use these cheap temporary contracts because it was basically seasonal sectors like tourism et cetera and in particular construction sectors okay so this all these investment in countries like like spain went into real estate and service based sectors because of the institutions in the in the labor market apart from the particular geographical location etc so there was a high increase a large increase in the demand for less skilled labor on the other hand from the viewpoint of the countries of oregon of course we know that it was a demographic room in less developed countries and in particular the the in at the beginning of the 2000 there were two very serious financial crisis in latin america which i i i label these countries as a slatham so particularly in argentina so given this uh set up well this is their state what i was telling you about interest rates there there you have the interest rate the mortgage interest rates you were paying sorry the mortgage interest rates you were paying uh before the the process of access to the euro and once we all became germans and got assimilated okay of course later on there is a there have been some divergence in the spreads but compared to the the previous differences these are really minor okay so this is the the the the the orient of the investment boom uh in in in most of these countries so as i said before spain which is here is the land of uh temporary contracts is a highly dual labor market as it's also the the case of italy and it was the case of portugal it was the case of greece so this means that when whenever you have a dual labor market you have like a two populations living in the same country so one one population those and the temperate contracts live in italy or in spain but in fact they are they are hiring hong kong whereas the other part of the population and the highly protected contracts live like in north korea or in the old soviet union okay so and they both coexist at the same time so what's the property of these labor markets the property of this labor market is that those who who live in hong kong under inverted comas are very easily hired but also they lose their jobs very very easily because these are typically short-term contracts which are not renewed so people go into unemployment they find another another short-term contract and so on and so forth but these are very very very appropriate contracts to hire low-skilled workers in the in the in in this valley low value other sectors that i was mentioning before so so of course when you have a labor market arrangement like that uncertainty is a big feature so if you if you move from one temporary contract to unemployment to another temporary contract and so on and so forth you cannot plan a family you cannot plan your life etc etc so first this affects label mobility so people don't move i don't want to move from ragusa to milan if i only get a contract for four months and second it affects also the fertility so as you can see this the origin of this dual label markets in spain was in the early in the early 80s and as you can see there was a collapse there was a collapsing fertility rates starting from the moment the labor market became so dualized here you cannot see it but these are fertility rates in the world and we are only beaten by italy as as the lowest the country with the lowest fertility rate in the world so what i what do where am i going with all these preambles well what i'm going is the following here you have historical uh the spanish population growth from a historical perspective starting from the mid the 19th century to just basically before the the great recession so remember this is the period you can see a huge fall in population growth and this is the period where duality took place in the labor market so suppose that you have someone being born in 1980 or 19 mid 90s student but this baby at its time will enter the labor market basically after completing compulsory education will be by age 16 so they will enter the labor market around here okay but there were very few of them because the fertility rates were extremely low at the time when demand for unskilled labor was very large okay so of course the solution spanish employers found for this shortage of demand in these low value added sectors was to bring the open to bring the gates to immigration okay so that that's the the way to to explain it so of course immigration filled the age gap here you have a it's called the pyramid of the spanish population which is the which is the the solid line because you can see this looks more like a like a cube rather than a pyramid uh so meaning that the of course population is aging at that time um whereas when you look at the at the other this is the so this is the profile of the of the spanish population whereas of course migrants are much younger so you can see that the biggest proportion of migrants was precisely around 30 or even younger so filling up the shortage of labor demanding in spain so um given the combination of this huge uh increasing in demand for labor and a foreign label and the uh the latin the sort of financial crisis that latin american countries were undergoing precisely at that period what it meant is that the large fraction here you have the the the distribution by country of orient the large fraction of migrants arriving between the first decade of the of the 21st century was mostly latin americans so basically were latin americans and then people from uh some of the eastern countries on a lesser amount like 20 as compared to 55 oh sorry 44 are coming from northern africa so there was a clear i remember at the time there was a very clear distinction between the type of migrants were arriving from both continents so you had the the africans were mostly men from morocco from some of the sub-saharan area they were mostly men who went to work in the fina in the construction sector whereas from latin america was basically women okay who were working in the housekeeping sector so they were looking after our kids they were looking after our elderly and that as i will point out in a second is part of why spaniards take these sort of migrants with gratefulness right because they they they they provided ways for us to work more hours for uh increases in female labor force participation etc so um uh you won't be see you won't see that but this is the distribution by occupations of migrants personal services and protected service so these were the key the people working in the housekeeping and so on 26 percent of immigrant women were working in that sector whereas this is women this is men men were mostly working in the in labor's mining construction et cetera whereas women specialize mostly as i said in in housekeeping uh also because of the cultural affinity of having so many many people coming from latin america saying and elementary services operations were basically 50 of women were working in catering hotels et cetera et cetera and sales and of course because they could speak spanish and furthermore they were they were particularly good in terms of uh communicational skills uh the best spanish for instance in the world is not spoken in spain it's spoken in colombia okay so we had plenty of colombians uh serving our coffees etc in a very very nice way so of course this led to huge changes as i mentioned before in sectoral composition so for instance here you have the share of the construction sector the yellow line by 2007 reached almost 14 percent of gdp which is extremely large by any accounts in any other country except perhaps ireland whereas of course with the boom with with the bust that we we will discuss later on this has gone down to almost six six percent so it has fallen down around eight percentage points so there are studies looking at how much of course migrants arrived there they were working in the construction sector but they were also searching for for places to live so they were the recipients of many of the mortgages so basically they accounted for almost half of the new housing units that were built up over that period okay that's that's what the evidence says so in the in this respect like supply creates some demand okay so that's one of the reasons why at that stage it was not very easy to detect that there was going to be a bubble because there was an increase in demand of these new cohorts of people entering the country of housing units the same could be said about the increase in house price growth this this yellow line is the the the increase of of the period between the early 90s and and nowaday and the end of the bubble which was in in 2009 uh and nowadays and basically it's a it's be there have been empirical papers looking at how much of increase in the bubble was due to this a higher demand of migrants and basically about one-fourth of uh house price growth is due to the higher demand by migrants it also has some effect on on inequality which is of course one another of the big themes nowadays so here you have a graph where you can see the the patterns followed by the unemployment rate which is the dashed line so this is the unemployment rate in spain or comment a little bit further further on and and this is the wage disper earnings dispersion so it's the difference between the earnings of the 19th percentile and the 10th percentile so the larger it is the more unequal is the is the earnings distribution so you could see that during the period in which migrants were surviving unemployment not only fell but inequality also fell a lot why because all these people working in the low value other sectors in the booming construction sector etc they were getting high wages so basically inequality fell down from the bottom it was the the less skilled workers that were earning much more than the low skill workers for in relative terms okay so the moment the the bubble burst and as i said we're coming about that in the next slides inequality immediately surged okay so what was the turning point in all this process were these migrants arriving smoothly to the country well the turning point in my view was in 2005 there was a huge regularization process so the typical migration policy between 2005 was one where you had stringent quotas which were not really enforced so basically each every year you could have like 30 000 people receiving working permits but in reality there were like 300 000 arriving and i i can discuss a little bit how was this happening part of it uh was probably due to the lack of coordination of the of the schengen group i mean some of these migrants especially latin americans seem to be arriving through amsterdam and some other airports where the the corresponding police the dutch police knew that they were speaking spanish spanish speaking and therefore they would not remain in that in the country uh and therefore they they they let them in so by 2004 there were like one million irregular migrants in spain uh so what did the government at the time was a socialist government do well they decided even that the pension system was under stress and that these people were working already there why don't we regularize them give them working permits uh insofar as they can prove that they have been entered the country before a given date and that they had been working uh before the previous six months and then they there were seven hundred thousand applications and about six hundred thousand working permits were awarded so you may see well this may have caused a huge call effect well that was not the case and in the views of the spanish population these migrants were somewhat helping to support the pension system all of a sudden they were paying social security contributions they were young most of them will not stay in spain because there is return migration they will not get the pension so there is a net benefit for natives so that's that that was really in the sociological service etc that was part of the explanation why spaniards were so much in favor at that stage and that of course echoes some of the some of the themes that could rise nowadays with the with the with the new wave of of migration of course uh coming from not from closer countries like latin america and spain but coming from syria afghanistan etc etc so well this is just a figure of people newly registered in the social security system this graph has the name of the prime ministers at the time so you have adnan was the leader of the conservative party until 2004 zapatero who was the leader of the president the prime minister and the socialist party and the current prime minister rajoy so you could see the this is the period of the amnesty the regularization and there was a huge increase in the number of newly registered the foreign newly foreign registered people in the social security uh which later on of course has a sort of values but not to the extent of the australian immigration policy of the of the early 2000s so um of course as i mentioned before this has postponed the the spanish population aging so here you have a graph where you have the weight this is h in the in the horizontal axis and you have the weight in the population of someone age 14 or someone age 64 etc etc what you can see is that the the peak of the the the peak of the spanish population weight its leads is before the peak of a of the population weight in countries which are aging uh faster like it could be france or germany etc so this was of course the effect of this almost five million new spaniards which were much younger than those who were living there so from room to crisis well let me just give you some numbers uh this is the unemployment rate and the labor force participation uh 2000 2007 and the latest figures 16. well of course the first striking things is of course labor force participation by men and women this is the overall figure it's much higher than among natives why because migrants are economic migrants they are coming to work in the country so they are looking desperately for a job of course given that the composition of employment that they were mostly employed in in low value added and especially in the in the construction sector when you look at the unemployment rate they almost doubled in the the natives unemployment rate nowadays the unemployment rate among migrants is almost 35 percent whereas among among natives so about 20 okay whereas in 2007 the difference was much smaller so the brand of the adjustment in spain of the employment adjustment has fallen on migrants but it has fallen on migrants because they were overrepresented in these temporary chip temporary contracts that that you can terminate basically at no cost okay so as i will argue later on this may be one of the explanations of why immigration hasn't seen as a problem in spain because they were not competing directly with spaniards they were segregated in the labor market or segregated to a state so of course when you look at the unemployment rate in spain for those of you who are not familiar it exhibits a shape that we call bulimic it has a bulimic labor market so because of this duality in the labor market is able to create millions of jobs during expansions so think of in the mid in the mid 90s spain had an unemployment rate of 22 percent which fell down to almost germans level 67 uh just before the onset of the great recession and now it goes back so it's like this is like bulimia you absorb a lot and then you you throw it away okay and this is just because of this dual labor market structure um so what has happened to this is just to remark one once more what i was telling you before what what has been the view of migration during this uh past period this recession period well remember we are in a single currency area uh when whenever we suffer a bad shock what economic tests would tell you is that before we could use the valuations now we cannot devalue because there is no alternative currency to the value so we have to cut our costs directly not through the change rate so this is called the internal devaluation so the way to adjust is if there is excess uh unemployment then of course these people look jobs elsewhere and in a country with so many migrants as it was spain this was the part of the population that were ready to move elsewhere of course the spaniards were much less mobile than these migrants so when the when the when the recession started the ones who really started to leave the country were these migrants okay rather than the spaniards so spaniards say saw the migrants as as a as a as a valve scape of avoiding the pain of of the recession so in terms of unit labor costs the the the alternative way of adjusting to a negative shock migrants were also very influential first of all one of the main reasons for achieving such a reduction in unemployment before the great recession was that the the migrants introduced huge flexibility in the labor market by adjusting their wages and this is not just slavery i mean remember many of these people were sending half or one third of their salaries abroad that's remittances so suppose uh i don't know i'll give you an example my my mother who is very elderly is look after a bolivian lady so this bolivian lady has his her family in bamba she's sending like one third of what she's getting paid the purchasing power is much much higher in bolivia than in madrid so of course she's ready to work of course there is collective bargaining on what how much he would pay so everything is completely legal but she's ready to to to to work for a lower wage than a native whose expenditures are completely inside inside the country so just to cut along a long story short during the during the recession spaniards some migrants as helping them to get abroad of course this may be a cynical view because some of these migrants were living and they were cutting their wages even even longer than even more than than the spanish so you look at the foreign population changes at the beginning of the of the or the end of the previous century there were 40 million spaniards and the predictions uh for the following 20 years was that the spanish population at the pace of aging that we were observing would reach about 36 million well by by 2010 2012 the spanish population have reached 47 million so of course there has been adjustment and you can see that it has fallen by about 600 and among migrants it has followed by about 1 million but the the the pillars of the of the of the working population of the especially of the pension system is much stronger than they were before that so as i said i will end the talk with the speculations about this special feature of migration in spain and especially why there is this lack of anti-migration poli feelings some of the ideas i want to share with you have already been discussed throughout the throughout the talk but let me just throw uh some new ones to you well as i mentioned in some of when i was showing you some of the graphs about the native sentiments the word migration it's not only spain which has a rather favorable view but also portugal so what has spain and portugal have in common is that they suffer a very long military dictatorships which led to articles and isolation of course this also led to huge outflows of spaniards and portuguese moving abroad on exile political exile etc etc so during the 30s to the 70s uh about 2.5 million spaniards left the county to work in germany to work in france and switzerland also they moved to latin america so in fact most of them moved two-thirds moved to latin america so there was a favorable attitude having been a secluded society having been an authority for so long there was a very favorable attitude toward openness okay and some sort of reciprocity as well the other hand after 40 years of military dictatorship most streamlight parties were repudiated okay so that's one of the reasons why there are no spanish parties far-right parties they they became completely erased from the political scene after after the late 70s of course a key issue is that immigrants arrive during an afternoon they arrived in a growing growth period but they helped consolidate in this long-lasting boom of course the end of the of the of the of the bell epoch was sad with the burst of the house in bubble etc but the spanish population appreciated their contribution to this long lasting prosperity period well as i mentioned before a large fraction came from latin america so of course this eases cultural affinity and facilitates assimilation because this is something which is not going to be the case with a with the current uh pressure from migrants we do not speak uh europe the countries of destination languages so i think the only lesson to be drawn from here is that we should invest a lot in in in in this new newer generation of migrants learning our languages fast because that facilitates assimilation a lot as i said before a large fraction work in the home service sector that increased female labor force participation was slow as in most of the southern countries quite a lot because all of a sudden college-educated women could leave their kids could leave their parents elderly parents with people who were ready to work for for a reasonable salary which were not available before on the other hand as i mentioned the 2005 large amnesty process almost 600 000 new working permits for those working regularly was seen by natives as a remedy for the pension system sustainability and it was i mean it delayed the the deficit the the system getting into a deficit by about five years that's the the computation the spanish welfare system uh is not particularly redistributive the transfers to the low uh the low income people are not particularly generous and of course migrants were uh over represented in that among the low paid so they were not perceived as a fiscal drug so this typical complaint of crowding out of the health system et cetera didn't happen because before the arrival of migrants even the the low income spanish people were not receiving that much the dual labor market has been i think very instrumental and i'm being cynical in this respect in a decreasing direct competition between natives and migrants remember 50 percent of migrants uh work under temporary contracts where this the figure for natives is much slower so they don't compete directly so that's something that they may also facilitate this appreciation of foreign workers of course related to to the current population migration pressure well the dysfunctionality of the spanish labor market with this dual big dualism makes spain a very non-attractive destination for refugees so the the the refugees crisis is completely unknown in spain i think so far we have admitted like 200 migrants and the basic reason even if the quota that it was assigned to us is much larger is nobody wanted to come to spain and finally i think this is a an issue which may also explain some of the of the lack of tension and and the favorable impact of migrants is that being such a recent phenomenon um the share of second generation migrants in spain is still fairly low and we know that most of the tensions come from the lack of assimilation the lack of integration of second second generation of migrants so especially there are some signs of warring processes in education and even in the residential segregation in cities so migrants live in some parts natives lives in some others and within the education system you could see also some pressure in particular public schools etc etc so that's the worrisome problem but the combination of all these features is what has made spain so far to benefit quite a bit from immigration and not see immigrants as foes but as collaborators thanks a lot well good news at last well i have a variety of questions to ask but of course you are supposed to speak first it's seven we have a quarter of an hour for q a session and i'm going to ask the the the first question and then we'll be collecting questions from you as well i mean you said that um this wonderful antidote in spain is the result of many factors many phenomena both economic ones and cultural ones that derive from spanish history but you know vaccines are well you have to re-inoculate a vaccine i mean they don't last forever for how long would you expect the situation to last and then is that in your opinion repeatable in other countries well italy is not that different from spain um my view you may you may have noticed that the spain is now under the recovery process of spain is growing not under very solid grounds but is now one of the fastest growing economies in europe so nothing has changed basically in the labor market so all these dualism is still in place so i would expect that the the same process that the dragon immigrants will operate now because the investment is going to go in the same sectors as before yeah that construction is of course after falling dramatically is starting to pick up so and the latest figures as far as i know is that the the the the outflows have slowed down and and the inflows have slightly increased so uh but over in a period of ten years i see remember we we are despite the the push given by by migrants in the to the age structure of the population we are aging at the at the highest speed so we will need thousands of migrants good evening uh after what you said about spanish immigration i like to draw a parallel with italian immigration the italian migration is just as recent as the spanish one i mean it started uh in the 80s and 90s because before that it was a very seldom and there was a dual labor market and in the secondary market of course migrants prevailed and in italy as well there was a sort of family welfare situation and so migrants and especially carers who came from abroad filled in the the the gaps that existed in our welfare system and italy had many um immigrants in the past century and i'd say up to the the 60s but the feeling the acceptance of migrants in italy were totally different i mean italy was practically black in your map and i i don't know whether i can ask you this question but is there any sort of explanation have you tried to find some explanation because in my opinion the initial situation was very similar but final result totally different well dictatorship was another factor you mentioned the only thing i can i can really see as a big difference is this cultural affinity of course spanish is a much wider spoken language in the world than italian so there are these adjustment calls of people arriving and learning the language all these latin americans spoke spanish better than us and that i think facilitate matters a lot we we saw that they must as us rather than they so i i think that's also uh i i'm not so sure whether the occupational distribution of migrants in italy was the same as in spain i tried to stress that the the huge impact on the on all the household production sector uh housekeeping etc was very instrumental in this favorable favorable view of migrants okay so and also i think it was a it was a good thing to have this a huge amnesty that the because these people were already there and they could start contributing to social security so it's a it's a mix it's a blend of different effects i think the cultural affinity and the language and religion etc etc it's something which may explain this these differences between spain and italy so it's not a model we can replicate the lesson to be drawn here is that you really need to assimilate these people as soon as possible you need really need to invest in the training in their schools etc etc you can you cannot lose a single moment i mean investment now are key because the lack of investment which will will be very long lasting will have very unfavorable effects for a long time bye thank you thank you for your explanation my question is the following well certainly migration can be an advantage for the pension system in the short term but if we're speaking about the long term uh well that that may create some imbalances since uh a percentage of these migrants might come to italy or spain when they are i don't know 30 or 40 so they have not paid a social contribution so there might be a deficit for the pension system well maybe we can collect a few questions and then answer well your presentation was very fascinating my concern is that in italy as well we have many affinities well we don't have language affinities but the true problem well since you live in italy as i mean you do live in italy but to what extent is this being exploited by some political parties and the important our cultural cognitive educational impoverishment creates a situation whereby we are mesmerized by persons such as calderoli i mean what you said about spain seems to well seems to say that i mean the spain i mean because of your past history because of the dictatorship the world portrays a country that is more developed than ours from the cultural viewpoint i i'm afraid that there is a sort of culture and and educational impoverishment of italy and some politicians try to exploit all that uh what's your opinion i'm just imagining it all or is it sort of reasonable what are what i what i think it might be i mean the the cause behind it all another question well first of all thank you for your lecture you said that migration in spain well responded to a number of requirements by the spanish economy such as the crisis of the pension system the slowdown in the birth rate the labor market that is sort of dualized and so on in your opinion is immigration the only answer or is there any other alternative to solve these problems well we need microphones for to guarantee translations yes well the italian problem wouldn't you say that the italian problem is a problem of religious intolerance vis-a-vis all these people who by culture and religion are so different from italians possibly italy as our shared person said at the the very beginning possibly uh possibly the migration phenomena were very similar over the years very similar to the spanish ones and they did not lead to any sort of intolerance as it is the case now because uh in the past with different migrants i mean people uh who had different religions whereas today migration in italy has different features sorry we must go on with questions let me start with the question about the impact on the on the pay as you go pension system of course it's a short term phenomenon remember even though there are bilateral agreements with by which pensions are portable remember pensions are proportional to your working life in a sense so they should they have some sense of proportionality so these guys remember were arriving at late 20s early 30s and and they were contributing and one million of them have left and about half a million of them didn't have bilateral agreements with the spanish government so they contributed uh in a change for for no pension to to bring with to the to the countries of oregon so it's a short-term phenomenon as i told you at the end it bought five years of peace for the for for the pension system in terms of a of deficit that's all okay and of course there is a long literature saying what sort of migrants should save you will need highly skilled migrants et cetera et cetera those who contribute most and you will need their rates uh return back to the country of origin at the large numbers as well so it's a it's a it's a it's a short-term impact but a favorable one for sure um regarding the the difference between spain and and italy which were the subject of a a couple of questions um i i think this difference about the political past in spain of course italy also went through a dictatorship but they've earlier than than in spain but the fact that the 40 years of streamlined parties ruling the country were willing to be completely forgotten i think has helped because they by now the the the there is some sort of a intrinsic relationship between xenophobia and and far-right parties due to the political transition in spain which was very smooth the even the franco support has helped to to to to move ahead with a with with an exemplary a democratic transition meant that as i i pointed out before the stream light is not existent in in spain and that may maybe some explanation of these small differences at the end of the day small differences make big differences in immigration the only solution of course not i mean the many of these this functionalities come from old-fashioned or outdated regulations etc etc and of course the first aim and the first goal would be to change these regulations and that's the way it is so migrants cannot be a solution but of course can come can help to solve some of these rigidities about religious intolerance i think we have two countries with more or less share the same religion although i mean i come from a country which was one of the first countries for instance to approve a gay marriage and i see this is one of the last countries to do so so i think in that respect spain is much more liberal maybe because the vatican is here and not in spain but that's another issue hello you