There is a mismatch that deserves to be named. While the PP and Vox extend the “national priority” and immigration structures the Andalusian pre-election, the data tell a different story. In all available sources — CIS, Eurotrack, Eurobarometer, Ipsos — immigration is not Spaniards’ top concern: housing is, by a wide margin. Moreover, in the latest series, immigration has lost weight. What grows is the discursive pressure and the cultural battle. Citizen ranking, by contrast, remains resilient.
A political map tilted toward immigration
From the Extremaduran pact to Aragon and Castile and León, the “national priority” has been taking space in different communities. Valencia tightened in March the residency requirement to access aid. Vox pushed in Congress a motion to restrict healthcare to irregular immigrants: the PP tried to introduce the nuance of the “verifiable rooting” through an amendment, Vox rejected it, and the PP ended up defeating the motion. And in Andalusia, immigration structures the pre-electoral campaign alongside healthcare and the potential PP-Vox agreement, with the elections of May 17 only three weeks away.
“One would expect, in this context, that immigration would be Spaniards’ first concern, but it is not.”
Adding to all this is the extraordinary regularization approved by the Government on April 14, which the opposition has made a reactive axis of its discourse. The data on this measure are adverse for the Government. According to SocioMétrica for El Español, 66.7% reject the regularization, rising to 80.5% among 17- to 25-year-olds, and 72% fear a pull effect. GESOP confirms that second figure (70%) and sketches a 52/48 split on the measure itself. In this context, one would expect immigration to be Spaniards’ first concern, but it is not. And this is the data that defines the moment: a society can reject a concrete measure without that rejection flipping its hierarchy of concerns. Put differently, the specific discontent does not automatically translate into the broader agenda.
Housing crushes the rest
The clearest picture comes from YouGov Eurotrack of March 2026, previously analyzed in Agenda Pública. When Spaniards are asked about the country’s two main problems, housing takes 49% — no other European country in the panel comes close. Immigration drops from 32% to 27% in a single month. The economic situation and healthcare are tied at 25%.
The Eurobarometer (Fall 2025) supports this reading with a different methodology: housing 36%, inflation 23%, and immigration and the economic situation tied at 17% as the third concern. Immigration dropped one point from the spring wave; it did not rise.
More a country’s problem than a personal problem
The most revealing data from the CIS Barometer of April is not the country’s problems, but the contrast with personal problems. Immigration appears as the fourth problem for the country (15.5%), but falls to sixth place when asked what affects respondents personally (7.7%). Spaniards’ private priorities are another: economic crisis (38.8%), housing (25.6%), healthcare (19.5%), quality of employment (16.7%), public insecurity (10.1%). Therefore, immigration, understood as a personal problem, falls behind even insecurity.
“We are facing a mental frame — generated by media coverage, the PP-Vox pacts and the regularization — rather than a damage perceived firsthand.”
Respondents mention immigration when asked about the country’s problems, but they do not suffer it in the neighborhood, at school, or at health centers. Put differently, we are dealing with a mental frame — generated by media coverage, the PP-Vox pacts, and the regularization — rather than a firsthand harm.
This distance explains why the topic can swell and recede in the ranking without any material change. And it also explains Vox’s electoral ceiling: when a campaign is built around a problem people mention but do not suffer, the votes such rhetoric yields are more limited than the noise suggests.
An ambivalent society, not a xenophobic country
It is worth avoiding the reverse reading. The Spanish society is not a tension-free multicultural raft. SocioMétrica found that 66.6% call for tougher action against irregular immigration, including 40% of PSOE voters. There is a transversal vein that the PP seeks to capture with the formula of the “verifiable rooting,” precisely to differentiating from Vox’s more identitarian frame.
But the picture is more complex. The SM Foundation’s report Youth Spaniards 2026 shows that the belief that immigrants “take jobs” has been falling for years — it stands at 43% — and half the young people acknowledge their economic contribution. Everyday openness in coexistence and abstract suspicion when faced with survey questions: that duality is the hallmark of the Spanish case.
Three conclusions
First: there is a real disconnection between the political agenda and the citizen agenda. Immigration is occupying more space on the institutional plane — regional pacts, parliamentary motions, campaign axes — while losing weight in Spaniards’ hierarchy of concerns, according to sources as diverse as the CIS, Eurotrack, Eurobarometer, and Ipsos. Political discourse and public opinion move in different directions. Any electoral strategy that assumes otherwise risks becoming disconnected from voters’ priorities.
“That rejection coexists with a citizen hierarchy where housing multiplies immigration as a perceived problem by more than two.
Second: rejecting a measure does not equate to flipping the order of concerns. The 66.7% who reject the extraordinary regularization is a robust and cross-cutting figure. But that rejection coexists with a citizen hierarchy where housing multiplies immigration as a perceived problem by more than two. Confusing the two — interpreting rejection of the measure as a xenophobic turn in society, as the right does — is a analytical error that distorts reading of the moment. The Spanish society has not shifted to an identitarian frame.
Third: nuance has the majority, maximalism does not. Vox leaves it out of its frame by betting on total rejection; the PP skirts around it with the “verifiable rooting” formula; the PSOE needs to strengthen its own narrative that combines order, rights, and recognition of the migratory contribution. Whoever does it first will have a considerable political edge.
The question for the coming months, with Andalucía three weeks away and an electoral cycle open until 2027, is not whether immigration will continue to rise in discourses. It will. The question is whether that discursive rise will manage to pull public opinion toward a shift in attitudes or whether Spain will remain, also in this, an ambivalent exception in Southern Europe. For now, the data say the latter.
