The regret of donors who feel they fueled immigration

Donating to an NGO: was it helping mass immigration?

It started with the quarterly donation to Médecins Sans Frontières. Then came the crisis, the membership cancellation. And years later, the conclusion: "I helped bring the migrants here." The testimony, shared in June 2018, was not an isolated case. Former donors to UNHCR, Oxfam or Cáritas told similar stories: sponsorships in Bolivia, a one-euro SMS after the Thailand tsunami, job contracts for Peruvian employees. Nearly all shared the same feeling: the naivety of someone who believed their money would save lives and discovered it was feeding a far more complex machinery.

The business of solidarity

The central thesis running through these confessions is that NGOs have ended up depending on the very crisis they claim to fight. "NGOs exist to feed the people who work in them," the argument goes. The scandals did not help: Oxfam in Haiti – staff paying for sensual services – and the 24 internal abuse cases revealed by Médecins Sans Frontières marked a turning point. On the other side, Cáritas is cited as the exception, with over 80% of funds reaching their destination. The disparity fuels distrust.

There is also the suspicion that the fundraising model relies on emotional blackmail. The commissioned street fundraiser became a common sight on Spanish streets at the height of the crisis. The 2010 cuts to public subsidies only reinforced the drift toward private funding.

From "no one is illegal" to second thoughts

Some former donors insist they were not pro-immigration, but simply recipients of a dominant ideology. "In Spain almost everyone was pro-immigration ten or fifteen years ago," they recall. The later shift – identity parties, restrictive rhetoric – would not be a drift, but a response to the discovery that humanitarian aid may have been facilitating an unplanned arrival. Self-ironic anecdotes abound, like the one-euro SMS sent to the tsunami appeal during a night out, summing up a kind of generational regret.

Between guilt and exoneration

The positions do not agree. Some argue that donating was a reasonable act in its context and that the shame should not be collective. Others reply that "lack of knowledge does not exempt from responsibility" and that naivety does not erase the consequences. In between, a third view reminds us that solidarity does not disappear: it is funded through taxes whether you like it or not. The underlying question – whether donating to an NGO is comparable to encouraging immigration – remains open.

The unsettling fact: in 2010, before the refugee crisis ever made headlines, the Spanish government was already cutting subsidies to these organizations. Distrust of the sector predated the regret. And perhaps that, more than any scandal, was what began to shift public opinion.