‘It’s a question of humanity’: how a small Spanish town made headlines over its immigration stance

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/11/small-spanish-town-headlines-immigration-villamalea

Version 0 of 1.

Mayor explains why Villamalea unanimously backed call to regularise undocumented migrants – across party lines

Flanked by farmland and nestled among the deep valleys of central Spain, few in Villamalea, a town of 4,200 people, expected to find their tranquil home splashed across Spanish media this summer.

“I’ve never been contacted by so many media outlets in my life,” said José Núñez Pérez, the conservative mayor of Villamalea. With a laugh, he added: “It made me question, just what have we done here?”

Everyone wanted to speak to him about the same thing; a town council motion, approved unanimously and across party lines, calling on the central government to push forward with a stalled proposal to regularise undocumented migrants in Spain.

“To us, it was the most natural thing in the world,” explained Núñez Pérez, as he paused to greet residents in the town’s central plaza. In recent decades, migrants from across the globe had been atrracted to Villamalea for the many jobs on offer.

The steady supply of labour had helped turn the town into an agricultural heavyweight – about 70% of the mushrooms sold in Spain come from here – while also transforming Villamalea into a rich tapestry of residents whose roots trace back to 32 countries.

For the 11 town councillors who backed the motion to grant papers to undocumented migrants – from Núñez Pérez’s People’s party to the Socialists and the United Left – this reality took precedence over party lines.

“We didn’t even debate it, we were all onboard right away,” said Núñez Pérez. “There’s a lot of work to be done here. And there could be even more – the problem for these companies is that they can’t find enough people to work.”

With the town’s companies weighing up whether to bring in temporary foreign workers, it only made sense to allow those who were already here a fair chance at a foothold. “It’s not just economics, it’s a question of humanity,” said the mayor.

In late August, the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, said gross domestic output in Germany would have been about 6% lower in 2019 if it hadn’t been for foreign workers. The picture was similar across the eurozone, she said. “Although they represented only around 9% of the total labour force in 2022, foreign workers have accounted for half of its growth over the past three years.”

In Spain, where the Socialist prime minister has insisted that migration is an opportunity, a surge in arrivals has helped to make the country a bright spot among Europe’s plodding economies.

Of late, even some of the most ardent critics of immigration have conceded its necessity; in June Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, the far-right leader who has long called irregular migrants a threat to Europe’s future, said her government would issue nearly 500,000 new work visas for non-EU nationals in the coming years, in addition to the 450,000 handed out since she took power.

While regularisation programmes have long been used across the EU, with 43 put in place by more than a dozen countries between 1996 and 2008, in Villamalea the push to grant papers was also rooted in the town’s history.

During much of the 20th century, the town’s residents were forced to fan out across Europe in search of work, said Venancio Cuenca Lopéz, the head of a local retiree association. “Some of them had papers, but some had no papers, no job offers, nothing,” he said. “We can’t say: ‘Well we did it, but now we’re against it.’ We’re all human beings, we need to have some empathy.”

He pushed back against claims that regularisation would push down wages. “There are companies that take advantage of undocumented workers, forcing them to work in poor conditions and paying them little. Then Spaniards can’t work because they’re competing with people who are getting paid peanuts,” he said. “So we regularise them, everyone has the same conditions.”

A digest of the morning's main headlines from the Europe edition emailed direct to you every week day

after newsletter promotion

The Guardian spoke to 10 or so residents, all of whom expressed support for the motion. From the pensioners who make up about a quarter of the town’s population to the around 20% who were born abroad – the majority from Morocco or Romania – residents shrugged off the far-right’s efforts to disparage diversity. “Here everyone has their life and their world, but when we get to together we all get along,” said María Anguix García.

At Villamalea’s town hall, officials are swift to cite the efforts many have made to foster integration, keenly aware that they’re doing so against a backdrop of swirling disinformation about migration.

“There was a day when people who practise Islam went to the church and got to know the prayer space and then they did the reverse; the Catholics went to the mosque and experienced it,” said the mayor “And around two months later, the five religions we have in Villamalea came together to pray in the church.”

When the flood of media requests poured in earlier this year, most wanted to know how Núñez Pérez reconciled his stance with others in the conservative People’s party, particularly as the leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, was increasingly linking immigration to insecurity.

Across the country, PP politicians have entered into governments supported by the far-right, anti-immigrant Vox party. As a result, PP politicians have lurched further to the right, leading to motions such as the one recently seen in Jumilla, a town of about 27,000 residents, where the PP-led council backed a ban on religious gatherings in public sports centres that appeared to target Muslims.

Núñez Pérez bristled at the comparison. “I’ve always said that I’m not paid by my party, I’m paid by the people of this town,” he said. “In my party, as in all parties, there are differences of opinion. But if you look at the wider picture, we’re not that different.”

It was, after all, the PP who had carried out more regularisation programmes than any other party since Spain returned to democracy.

Others in the PP had also followed in Núñez Pérez’s footsteps; in late September, about 20 miles (32km) away in the town of Tarazona de la Mancha, a similar mix of councillors, though headed by a Socialist mayor, had come together to unanimously pass their own motion calling on the central government to grant papers to undocumented migrants.

Even so, Núñez Pérez knew that the fact that he was a conservative mayor backing regularisation had become a “morbid” fascination for many. “But I think it’s the most natural thing; I know what happens in my town, we live quietly, we live in peace and we learn from each other,” he said. “In interviews they always ask me about my political party. But just because someone fires a shot over there, it doesn’t mean we’re all going to do the same.”