Spanish America open to Europe's Catholics: the alternate history

Spanish America without fences: what if Catholics from all over Europe had arrived?

The Spanish Monarchy kept an iron grip on who could cross into Hispanic America: nearly all of the flow came from the Crown of Castile, and non-Spanish Europeans entered only with special permits or irregularly. Meanwhile, the British colonies in North America received half a million Europeans before their independence alone, and the total by the late 18th century exceeded 700,000. What if Spain had peine its door to Catholics from all over Europe?

The Spanish migration funnel versus the British tide

The numbers are stubborn: fewer Europeans arrived in Spanish America during the viceroyalty era than in the Thirteen Colonies, despite the territory being far larger. Emigration was far more tightly controlled and came overwhelmingly from Spain. The result was a chronic "demographic anemia" in the viceroyalties, made worse by an indigenous population density ten times higher than north of the Rio Grande.

The domino effect on the economy and the map

With massive Catholic immigration from Europe, the encomienda and hacienda system would have given way to more family-sized farms, a network of small merchants and artisans would have emerged, and the pressure toward slavery would have been reduced. Some projections speak of an Argentina of 70 million, a Uruguay of 10 and a Chile of 30 — in other words, an unrecognizable Southern Cone. In the north of New Spain, the American Southwest — today California with 40 million and Texas with 30 — could have formed its own country alongside northern Mexico, something like the Provincias Internas (the Spanish Empire's northern frontier provinces).

History is not written with conditionals, but the demographic contrast between the two Americas invites us not to dismiss the alternate history. Would the United States as we know it have existed? Nobody knows; the numbers simply invite the question.