We were looking at the number
of foreign residents and their overall value to Spain.
Since last week, fresh totals
have appeared, sometimes higher than the ones we produced. As always, they are
painstakingly exact, and no doubt, utterly wrong.
A site from the Ministry
of Labour and Social Inclusion gives the number of foreigners in Spain as
at January 1st, of 6,007,553. So we know how we stand. Although the number is
easier to appreciate if it is rounded out to six million foreigners.
Some of them retired, some of
them living from income from abroad, some of them working and some of them
studying. Some of them sending their money home to their families, as they
should.
Spain has a population of 47,440,000 they say, so foreigners make up 12.6%
of the whole – that’s one in every eight people.
The Brits are counted in the
above guaranteed government figures at 407,628 (as
opposed to last week’s padrón figures found
elsewhere at 282,124). The Schengen Visa Info – quoting something called Statista, gives us a completely different Brit total in Spain of 313,975.
The ABC meanwhile claims 290,372 Brits resident in Spain
(the comments from this right-wing paper about Spain’s foreign population are,
as always, a pleasure to read).
Then there’s the INE – the official bean-counter site –
which doesn’t have a clue. The best we can find from
them is July 2021 ‘non-EU Europeans’, which come to… 603,162 (you see: the
Brits, post Brexit, aren’t worth a place of their own any more).
There are other official government
sites available, but the browser found a ‘potential security threat and did not
continue to www.mites.gob.es’. So, we
shall remain blissfully ignorant of the information to be found on that no
doubt highly useful page.
Then we have The Mirror headline from October last year which reads: ‘British expats are
said to be leaving Spain "in droves"’; while, conversely: Idealista says the opposite: ‘The Brits bought 7,560 homes in the second half
of 2021 – the largest group of foreign buyers’. In all, nearly 64,000 homes
were bought by foreigners between July and December last year. And that’s good
money brought here almost exclusively from outside Spain.
With all the confusion, the
authorities will understandably react according to the figures to hand (once
they’ve looked up the phrase ‘in droves’
in the dictionary), without worrying if they are correct; or maybe just go out for
a coffee instead.
My estimate last week of the half
a million wealthiest foreign residents,
worth to Spain some 10,000 million euros each year (plus their 250,000€ homes
and 20,000€ cars and so on), brings us back to the question: why chase after just
the tourists while ignoring the foreigners who live here, or who potentially
could?
The only time the subject of
the foreigners come up – beyond of course at Vox rallies – is when it’s time to
tax us.
But you won’t find any official
agency or policy that promotes foreign
home-buyers investing in Spain!
The tourists are counted in a
similar exact but hopelessly wrong way as the foreigners. Someone is paid to provide
the numbers (a bit like the new school they’re building near us at €724,027.27 –
now fellers, hold on just a minute, does that include the chalk?). Perhaps, by not rounding them off, they show how
hard they work at these sums.
Tourists, then, are described
as anyone foreign who comes to Spain (even if they are taking an onwards flight
to somewhere else and never even leave the airport), plus all the people on all
the cruise ships – regardless of if they disembark for a two-hour stroll around
Málaga harbour or not – plus all the people who hop over to Spain every weekend
(add ’em all together José), but not the ones who drove across the frontier or
who slept in the guest room last night or on the sofa.
Then we have those non-EU
citizens who own homes here are but aren’t allowed to stay for more than 90 in
any 180 days. What are they exactly – residents, home-owners, tourists? No one
knows or seems to care – except of course for the affronted local businesses.
A few years ago, I went with
a couple of senior local Brit spokesmen (if you see what I mean) to see the delegación provincial – the government representative
for Almería and his team – to make the point that, with so many small and disappearing
villages, a possible answer might be to turn one or more into an old-folks’
retirement centre for rich wealthy well-heeled foreigners. Do you see the idea?
Bring along a few English-speaking nurses – after all, there are plenty of disillusioned
Spanish professionals returning from London thanks to the Brexit fallout – to bring
movement and life back to some moribund pueblo
that has no earthly source of income. You could even sell the homes as
lifetimes leases.
Anyway, they said they’d get
back to us.