Eight Million Deportations: The Figure Vox Won't Confirm

Deporting Eight Million? How the Figure and its Cost Are Being Discussed

Eight million deportations do not fit into any published budget. The figure has been associated with Vox for over a year, but the party has not set it down in writing nor detailed where the money would come from. At the origin of the matter, the number is corrected: the party doesn't speak of eight million, but of 'as many as are necessary.' That is to say, no specific figure. And without a number, there is no plan, and without a plan, there is no bill.

What Vox Proposes on Deportations and What It Doesn't

The measure the party puts forward is not mass expulsion, but reversing ongoing regularizations and reviewing nationality statuses already granted. This is the point emphasized when discussing the number: affecting nationality impacts more people than a specific deportation, as status is passed down to descendants. Seen this way, the issue resembles less an exit operation and more an administrative adjustment. And there, whatever they discuss, room for maneuver exists.

The Cost of Deporting Millions of People

No one has put a figure on the cost. Moving millions of people requires flights, agreements with third countries, paperwork, and years. No European country has carried out an operation of this scale. The bill would include charters, readmission agreements, compensation, and the opportunity cost of expelling a working-age population from a country already losing native-born residents. The model that is circulating is that of the Gulf States: withdrawing residency permits for those who lose their jobs within 60 days. That system relies on temporary labor without the intention of settling, which doesn't resemble the European demographic structure.

How Many Are There and Why the Figures Don't Add Up

Eight million coexists with much larger estimates. Some speak of over 20 million entries since 1990, including children born here; others raise the surplus to 26 million, and a third group settles for 15 or 16 million. The range is so wide that any policy built upon it is, first and foremost, a measurement problem. As a curious anecdote, one intervention recalls that in 1500, Spain dominated half the world with seven million inhabitants, and concludes that quality matters, not quantity.

The Labor Market and Housing: The Economic Argument

The core of the reasoning can be summarized in three sentences: downward pressure on wages, increased cost of housing and food, and competition for social benefits. The thesis holds that withdrawing the Minimum Vital Income, the Guaranteed Insertion Income, and the agricultural subsidy would return thousands of inactive natives to the labor market. The counterargument is sectoral: agriculture, hospitality, care, and construction depend on foreign labor with no local replacement willing to fill those vacancies. Some even turn the argument around and argue that the problem is not the demand for labor, but the price: with the shopping basket soaring, real disposable income is shrinking for everyone, regardless of nationality. A fine-grained breakdown, item by item, does not appear anywhere.

Nationality, Ius Sanguinis, and the Legal Front

Here the terrain becomes legal. It is proposed to tighten access to nationality, prioritize ius sanguinis (right of blood), and review past grants. The snag is that nationality, once granted, is a protected civil status: reversing it requires significant reforms and opens the door to mass litigation. How many naturalizations would be reviewable and on what legal basis remains the unanswered question.

The Political Calculation: Promise, Vote, and the Italian Precedent

Another reading sees electoral tactics here. The promise of expulsions mobilizes votes but clashes with the party's own electoral base and the labor model that sustains the economy. The most repeated argument against the credibility of the promise is domestic: a party supported by the middle and lower classes cannot dispense without damage with the labor that sustains these services. The Italian precedent is used as a warning: a party that came to power with this discourse has not carried out mass deportations and today defends that Europe needs immigrants. Hence the suspicion of a claim without execution.

With these elements, it is predictable that the figure will remain undefined, and the bulk of the issue will shift to regularizations and nationality, where administrative margins are greater. However, if someone were to publish the real bill for deporting eight million people one day, the discussion would change sides due to pure arithmetic. And that day, probably, no one will see it coming.