Abascal limits Vox's remigration to those living on welfare benefits

Abascal limits remigration to benefit claimants and the debate heats up

Santiago Abascal has put in writing what until now floated in the air: Vox's remigration is not an abstract concept, it is «the people who are living off the social benefits that Spaniards need». The phrase, in an interview picked up by El Mundo, comes with a nuance that is not minor: it is no longer about expelling everyone who is irregular, but about selecting by payslip. And that is where the trouble begins.

The definition has a catch. If the criterion is receiving a benefit, the universe of those affected skyrockets far beyond what the Vox voter's imagination suggests: pensioners, long-term unemployed, families with dependants. Does it refer only to foreigners or to anyone with a subsidy? The text does not clarify, and that ambiguity is exactly the terrain where the party can fish without committing itself.

The argument Vox cannot dodge: who picks the tomatoes

The counterattack came quickly and through the classic flank. Some argue that anyone calling for mass expulsions should first explain who will fill the jobs those workers hold today, and the argument has been repeated in various forums with the same structure: if fewer and fewer nationals are willing, someone will have to come and work. Vox's reply is just as old: first wages go up, then we'll see.

The problem is that the dilemma is not binary. The debate cited 15,000 temporary work trips to France this very year, suggesting the problem is not only a labour supply issue but one of conditions. If wages were the decisive variable, those same workers would not cross the border. The question left hanging: is remigration a migration policy or an elegant way of not touching the labour market?

From the fields to the plumber: the sector nobody mentions

The conversation drifted towards more uncomfortable ground for the selective deportation discourse. Electricians, plumbers, bricklayers, plasterers, painters. Trades where the lack of generational renewal is structural and where the foreign worker is not competing for a benefit, but for a wage the Spanish self-employed no longer want. There, Abascal's definition does not fit: nobody remigrates a plumber for claiming unemployment benefits, because he does not claim them.

Automation appeared as a way out, with more will than budget. Mechanising the fields requires investment the small producer does not have, and the debate on wage dumping and shared housing —fifteen people in one flat, it is said— points to a problem remigration does not solve, only displaces.

The political trap of the definition

Limiting remigration to benefit recipients has an obvious electoral advantage: it turns a radical measure into common sense. Who defends that someone should draw from the public purse without working? Almost nobody. The cost is that the measure loses internal coherence: if the criterion is the benefit and not nationality, then the Spanish pensioner also falls into the bag. And if the real criterion is nationality, Abascal's definition is a euphemism.

The debate remains open at the exact point where the party left it: no list of those affected, no savings figure and no explanation of what happens to the sectors that already depend on that labour. Meanwhile, the question nobody fully answers: how many of those receiving benefits are exactly the ones Vox wants to leave?