This op-ed, written by the Pedro Sánchez, the Prime Minister of Spain, is an accurate and beautiful encapsulation of why the appalling attitude of many countries, including my own, towards immigrants of all kinds is 100% immoral and, in the end, self-defeating.

Everyone should read it.

Regarding undocumented immigrants in Spain:

…Some leaders have chosen to hunt them down and deport them through operations that are both unlawful and cruel. My government has chosen a different way: a fast and simple path to regularize their immigration status.

Why? At least two reasons.

One moral:

Spain was once a nation of emigrants. Our grandparents, parents and children moved to America and elsewhere in Europe seeking a better future during the 1950s and 1960s and following the 2008 financial crisis. Now, the tables have turned. Our economy is flourishing. Foreigners are moving to Spain. It is our duty to become the welcoming and tolerant society that our own relatives would have hoped to find on the other side of our borders.

And one pragmatic:

The West needs people. Currently, few of its countries have a rising population growth rate. Unless they embrace migration, they will experience a sharp demographic decline that will prevent them from keeping their economies and public services afloat. Their gross domestic product will stagnate. Their public health care and pension systems will suffer. Neither A.I. nor robots will be able to prevent this outcome, at least not in the short or medium term. The only option to avoid decline is to integrate migrants in the most orderly and effective way possible.

No-one is suggesting this is an easy manoeuvre to pull off in today’s world. Large amounts of migration can appear to add to various big challenges countries face.

But the fundamental idiocy in how people that should know better insist we solve challenges such as underinvestment in social good, and wind us, the populace, up to a fever pitch of hatred towards some of the most desperate, unlucky people in the world, is that the cause of - and hence the solution to - these challenges is generally in fact not fundamentally related to whether or not immigrants are coming to our shores.

It won’t be easy. We know that. Migration brings opportunities, but also huge challenges that we must acknowledge and face.

Nevertheless, it is important to realize that most of those challenges have nothing to do with migrants’ ethnicity, race, religion or language.

Rather, they are driven by the same forces that affect our own citizens: poverty, inequality, unregulated markets, barriers to accessing education and health care. We should focus our efforts on addressing those issues, because they are the real threats to our way of life.

These social challenges are a result of other choices that our society has made, independent of immigration policy. Humans made those choices. Humans could make different choices if we really want to make our society a better place for everyone who lives in it, or wants to live in it - rather than simply grant wealth and power to a few elites who will happily sink to any depth, including lying, disrespecting, misleading and harmful as many of us - “native” or immigrant - in order to get to get it, showing no concern for the vast cost to the rest of us and our societies that it would entail.

We, as Western nations, must choose between becoming closed and impoverished societies, or open and prosperous ones. Growth or retreat: Those are the two options before us. And by growth, I’m not talking only about material gain, but also our spiritual development.

Governments can buy into the zero-sum thinking of the far-right and retreat into isolation, scarcity, selfishness and decline. Or they can harness the very same forces that, not without difficulties, have allowed our societies to thrive for centuries.

For me, the choice is clear. And for the sake of our prosperity and human dignity, I hope many others will follow suit.

Me too, me too.