Editor’s Note: This week’s post offers additional reflections from friend and retired nonprofit leader, Greg Cantori. Greg and his family moved from Baltimore to Spain in 2025. In this post, he shares how Spain is approaching immigration and “regularizing” people already there. While the country sizes are different; Spain’s approach offers a fresh possibility as our nation avoids the work of developing a just and win-win immigration policy and focuses on unwarranted punishment and cruel, fear-based enforcement of flawed policies.

Two Countries Face the Same Problem. One Does Math. The Other Cruelty.

 Last week, while I excitedly signed my new Spanish resident card in Benajarafe, Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced that Spain would regularize up to 500,000 undocumented immigrants.

The news arrived with a quiet, bureaucratic matter-of-factness. Here is the problem, here is the solution, here is the timeline. No sirens, no midnight raids, no rhetoric about “invasions.” Just the sound of a country choosing its future over the xenophobic screaming of the far right.

Meanwhile, 4,000 miles away, my former country is ”mounting an attack on undocumented immigrants that is hostile, cruel, and results in fear, deportation, family instability and prisons that look like concentration camps. Same problem. Two responses. One grounded in arithmetic. One in cruelty.

The Humanity Behind Peaceful Math

Spain’s fertility rate has collapsed to 1.2 births per woman, the lowest in the EU and far below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. The math is cold and unforgiving: without more working-age people, there won’t be enough funds for pensions or hands to staff hospitals, build homes, pick crops, or care for the elderly.

So Spain did something we oddly consider radical: It stopped pretending that these people were invisible.

The government estimates roughly 840,000 undocumented migrants are living in Spain. By offering regularization to approximately 500,000, roughly 60% of the total undocumented population, Spain is effectively deciding to solve the problem by fixing the paperwork.

These are people already here working, paying for groceries, caring for children, and woven into the neighborhood fabric. 

The government’s response wasn’t to hunt them; it was to count them.

By granting work permits to those with clean records, Spain is turning “shadow workers” into fully recognized contributors, and eventually, citizens.

“Spain needs to choose between being an open and prosperous country, or a closed-off and poor country,” Sánchez told Parliament. It’s not a campaign slogan. It’s a demographic reality. One in three babies born in Spain today has an immigrant mother. As Migration Minister Elma Saiz put it: “These children are the Spaniards of tomorrow.”

The American Horror Story: A Choice to Dehumanize

The United States faces roughly the same demographic math. Our fertility has also fallen far below replacement. Our economic growth depends on immigration. And yet, we have chosen cruelty over math.

If the United States applied the “Spanish Formula”—regularizing 60% of our estimated 11 million undocumented neighbors—we would instantly bring 6.6 million people fully into the light. Many of these neighbors had the rug pulled out from under them—revoked green cards, shifting qualifying rules, elimination of protected status, and other deviously bureaucratic traps.

The majority are already taxpayers (contributing $96.7 Billion in 2024) to a system that refuses to recognize their contributions and humanity. Regularization simply acknowledges the reality that they are already here, already working, and already essential to our lives.

Instead, we have chosen a different path.

We’ve all seen the images. Children in cages. Families ripped apart at gunpoint. Masked and heavily armed kidnappers, called ICE, dragging parents from their cars, storming hospitals, churches, and homes. We are watching rapidly expanding concentration camps treat human beings the way airlines lose luggage. This is not immigration policy. This is state terror.

The Peace of Being Counted

Here in Spain, nobody is looking for a reason to pull you over. Nobody is scanning the car at a stoplight or school, or work to check your skin color. Spain has decided that immigrant presence is a benefit, not a threat. The result is a profound, structural sense of safety—not just for the immigrants, but for our society that stops wasting its resources along with human rights abuses in hunting them.

My granddaughter Venus recently joined the local chess club. She sits at a table alongside Spanish kids, Moroccan kids, Chinese kids, and kids whose families arrived from all over the map. Spain looked at those children and saw the doctors, teachers, and neighbors of 2040. They decided to welcome them. America looked at the same future and built a machine of shackles, guns, and cages.

From a peaceful plaza in Benajarafe, as I sit as a recent new resident of Spain, the choice seems obvious. Math or cruelty? Prosperity or terror? Spain offers valuable lessons for the United States when attention turns to immigration policy and away from terror and cruelty.