Spain offers Burnham an alternative to Labour’s Danish-style immigration crackdown

During the Makerfield by-election, Andy Burnham backed Shabana Mahmood’s immigration reforms, aligning Labour’s prevailing strategy to the anti-immigration mood.

Mahmood’s position, in short, follows the Danish Social Democrats’ model: harden rhetoric and reduce numbers to take the ground from the far right.

Burnham had previously criticised the home secretary’s plans, warning they leave people “in a sense of limbo and unable to integrate”. But he seems to have dropped this concern to appeal to the political context of the Leave-voting, Reform-susceptible constituency of Makerfield.

The broader public mood on immigration is, however, more nuanced. Having won the by-election, Burnham now has an opportunity to revisit the assumptions behind Labour modelling itself after the Social Democrats to consider a potentially more successful model: Pedro Sanchez’ Spain.

Immigration figures don’t lie…

The headline figures on immigration anxiety are striking. Immigration ranks among the top three public concerns, with two-thirds of Brits saying immigration levels are too high.

However, if you look beneath the surface, a more complicated picture emerges.

When pollsters separate regular from irregular migration, only 22% of Britons say migration has been bad for the country. Those travelling via established visa routes make up the majority of arrivals.

Almost two-thirds of people support keeping NHS staffing levels, even if it means higher migration. Moreover,  six in 10 people would prioritise having enough workers for industries with skill shortages over reducing immigration. It is not as straightforward, then, to say Britons want less immigration across the board.

…but liars figure

The picture is even more complicated by polling that looks at the perception gap between what the government is doing and what is happening with immigration.

Two-thirds of Brits wrongly believe that the immigration rate is rising while net migration has fallen to 171,000 in 2025 under Labour, which represents an 82% drop from Tories’ 944,000 in 2023. Despite that sharp fall, three-quarters of voters say they have little or no confidence in the government on immigration.

That gap between the reality of net migration and the public’s perception suggests that the public is wrongly informed. Political parties like Reform and Restore Britain, of course, benefit from the public being  misinformed because their electoral success depends on voters’ anxieties around immigration.

If voters cared to understand the true figures, they would likely not trust Reform’s Robert Jenrick to lower immigration, as he was immigration minister during the 2023 peak.

The perception gap also suggests that, whatever you do to immigration numbers, it will not change the electoral picture as voters’ fears are based on what they are being told, rather than the reality. Labour’s strategy is to talk up immigration as a problem to be tackled when no one trusts them to tackle it. Working hard to lower the numbers, when no one thinks they are, might not be a winning strategy.

Play with fire, get burned

Mahmood’s strategy is coherent on paper. If Labour concedes a bit on immigration — by enacting strict asylum rules, enforced returns and caps on settlement — Reform might no longer have a distinct offer to voters.

The approach is akin to setting off a Labour-managed controlled burn to remove the fuel for a Reform-led wildfire.

For example, by making targeted concessions to the anti-immigration mood, Labour wants to prevent a Reform or Restore government that would do far worse, like ICE-style interventions into communities or stripping citizenship from British citizens. The problem is the people you are trying to satisfy with a controlled burn want the wildfire, so all you end up doing is normalising fire.

Reform, Restore Britain and Tommy Robinson’s base want the UK to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, abandon the Refugee Convention, and breach international prohibitions on torture. Labour would hopefully never go that far, so Mahmood’s strategy does not approach a satisfactory destination.

The concessions, then, take enough of Reform’s programme to legitimise the nativist framework, while being unable to deliver its logical conclusions. Therefore, raising the threshold of what counts as tough enough and making the subsequent demands easier to voice.

Concessions help the far right

Across Europe, the evidence is clear. When centre-left parties adopt far-right positions on immigration, it does more good for the far right than for the centre-left.

Studies in journals like Political Research Exchange and Political Science Research and Methods found that mainstream parties moving toward radical-right positions on immigration consistently failed to win over right-wing voters. They also found that centre-left strategy legitimised right-wing positions, pushing voters toward the radical-right and losing support among their own base.

Centre-left parties end up squeezed from both sides, which is precisely what happened to Starmer’s Labour.

Even on its own terms, the Danish model does not work. In Denmark, the Social Democrat Party just had its worst election result since 1903. Labour politicians took inspiration from a strategy that did not even work for the people who created it.

Hasta la visa, Shabana

While Labour has been looking to Copenhagen, Pedro Sánchez’s Spain offers an alternative model, particularly for a Labour government that once made economic growth its central mission.

Sánchez’s government, for instance, launched an extraordinary regularisation process in January, expected to allow about 500,000 migrants without legal status who are already in Spain to apply for temporary legal status, moving them from the ‘shadow economy‘ into legal employment.

Under Sanchez’s pro-immigrant policies, Spain’s economy grew by 2.8% in 2025 — roughly twice the EU average and the UK’s rate. Sánchez has argued that migration represents 25% of Spain’s per capita GDP, 10% of social security revenues and just 1% of public expenditure.

This approach has historical precedent: Spain’s 2005 regularisation under former Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, gave legal status to more than 600,000 migrants who had become undocumented. Research found tax revenues increased by around €4,000 per regularised immigrant each year.

Critics would imagine such an approach only encourages illegal immigration, but studies found no evidence of a significant “magnet” effect.

Don’t chase the right on immigration

Spain has by no means solved immigration as a political issue or defeated the far right, as Vox remains the third largest party in parliament.

Spain has, however, demonstrated that a centre-left government does not need to chase the far right, and can instead, through immigration, produce economic growth that outpaces sluggish EU peers like France and Germany.

Spain’s approach also offers a remedy to the UK’s ageing population, chronic labour shortages and a Treasury that consistently misses its growth targets. The British public broadly supports migration that produces growth.

Public hostility is concentrated on immigrants who have arrived by irregular means. But the Spanish model shows that regularising people’s stay is vastly more productive than undermining fundamental rights to posture as tough.

Burnham changed his mind on Mahmood’s approach once. The evidence should give him good reason to change it again.

The Danish model is not working. Spain has shown another way is possible.

Featured image via Euronews

By Hugo Harvey

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