In the first 10 months of 2023, more than 43,000 migrants and refugees landed on the Spanish coasts. Most of them reached the Canary Islands in small boats known as pateras. The number far exceeds arrivals to the UK, whose shores have been reached by about 27,000 people in the same period. The disparity is even more striking considering Spain has a population of 48 million, in contrast with the 68 million in the UK.

People arriving by small boats are a minority in the immigration flow, and are not necessarily the ones who stay in Spain. About 15% of the Spanish population is foreign-born – the population is actually growing due to waves of new immigrants, mostly from Colombia, Morocco and Venezuela.

Yet Spain has not witnessed the same level of outrage and alarmist anti-immigration rhetoric we see in the UK, where politicians across the political spectrum and even journalists embrace the slogan “stop the boats’’ as a casual way to speak about desperate people trying to escape hardship. Unlike in the UK, in Spain net migration numbers are usually reported not as a negative, but as a welcome source of growth in a country with an ageing population.

Immigration has not become a central issue in Spain’s political debate, and the weaponised rhetoric of “invasion” is marginal, used primarily by the far-right party Vox. Vox has very limited power, with 12% of the vote in the most recent general election.

Vox gained some traction in 2018 by focusing its campaign on........

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