Cáritas mobilizes its volunteers in Madrid over immigration

Cáritas sends out its legion of volunteers in Madrid: the Church mobilizes for mass regularization

«This is our moment», they must have thought at Cáritas Madrid when they activated more than 5,500 volunteers for the Charity Day campaign. But the message that comes with the collection boxes is not the classic humanitarian appeal: the organization has put its entire machinery at the service of a political demand — a regularization of migrants «with broader scope» than the Government's proposal. Among the volunteers, some admit they have already been «stopped three times» while handing out the boxes, and that they respond with a smile and brushing off the critics.

The business of selective charity

It is not the first time that religious NGOs have been accused of using emotional appeals to collect data and donations, only to channel the money into causes other than those advertised. In this case, several analyses suggest that Cáritas's priority is not to help Spaniards in difficulty, but irregular migrants. The anecdote going around is telling: when a Spanish woman went to drop off her CV to work as a caregiver, the head of an office snapped at her: «we give preference to illegal immigrant women because poor things are all alone». The preference is no accident: it is part of a strategy aimed at regularizing as many as possible, at the expense of Spaniards who are also alone.

The collection box campaign: solidarity or lobbying?

The images of volunteers with their boxes on the streets of Madrid contrast with Cáritas's official discourse, which in parallel is pressuring the Government to expand regularization processes. The question hanging in the air is whether donors' money is being used to fund this political pressure or to genuinely help those most in need. Meanwhile, critics point out that «the Church and the migration business» walk hand in hand, and that behind the charity lies a business model that creates dependency.

With all this, the Charity Day campaign has become a battleground: some see solidarity; others, a machine for raising resources for a political project that harms ordinary Spaniards. Time will tell whether the volunteers manage to fill the boxes or whether the public has started to look differently at those who ask «for the poor».

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