Jeff Bezos’s Newspaper Says Low-Wage Migration Is ‘Progressive Path’

Billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post is pushing the one-sided claim that migration expands a nation’s economy — while it carefully hides the reality that mass migration also shrinks citizens’ living standards.

On June 20, the newspaper posted an article lavishly praising Spain’s migration policy of importing cheap workers, consumers, and renters from South America, under the online headline: “Spain blazes a progressive path, fueling growth.”

The article’s page-one headline suggested that President Donald Trump’s l0w-migration, wage-raising policy is bad for Americans: “As Trump shuts out migrants, Spain opens its doors and fuels economic growth: Defying the anti-immigrant trend in the U.S., Spain is reaping economic benefits by granting citizenship to tens of thousands of newly-arrived workers.”

“In this [Spanish] nation of 48 million with long colonial links to the New World, an influx of predominantly Latin American immigrants is helping fuel one of the fastest-growing economies in Europe,” author Anthony Faiola wrote. The government’s pro-migration policies “could set up this nation as the antithesis of Trump’s America: a migrant-friendly progressive paradise.”

But the article hides the declining living standards in Spain, and the outflow of young Spaniards to other countries, as the immigrant share of the country grows to one in five, or 20 percent.

“There’s a general bias in the media and elsewhere trying to portray immigration in the most positive way,” noted Steve Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies. He added:

There’s an unfortunate tendency to simplify the argument so that a bigger GDP is always better. But we know that what makes a society wealthier when its per capita GDP goes up, and it’s not at all clear that immigration has a positive effect there.

When anyone talks about the impact of immigration on the economy, they need to … discuss the impact on wages, rents, productivity, public coffers, and host of other things.

Outside the Washington Post, other reports have noted that Spain’s wages have flatlined while rents have risen as millions of migrants compete for low-tech jobs and apartments.

“Since the early 2000s, the real growth of the average wage is estimated to have been between 0.2% and 0.6% across the entire wage scale,” said a January 2025 report by the International Labour Organization.

“Although nominal wages have risen above inflation in 2023 and early 2024, real wages are still 2.5% lower than before the pandemic broke out,” according to a May 2024 article in SurInEnglish.com. “By contrast, almost half of OECD member countries, including neighbouring Portugal and France, have successfully recovered or even surpassed pre-pandemic real wage levels.”

“Inflation is estimated to have absorbed 89% of wage increases since 2018, implying that workers’ purchasing power has barely improved in real terms,” noted Livingsitges.com.

“Between 2000 and 2022 Spain’s per capita GDP has lagged behind that of the EU-15 [countries],” partly because of the immigrant inflow, said a February 2024 report by Elcano Royal Institute, adding:

 The concentration of immigrants in low-skilled and poorly-paid jobs, along with their lower rates of employment, have led to an increase in rates of inequality and poverty … The low productivity of the Spanish economy is often identified as one of its biggest structural problems, and the existence of an abundant supply of low-skilled workers incentivises investment in services with low added costs.

“Millions of workers, both Spanish and foreign residents alike, those [GDP] numbers mean little,” Tarek Salame wrote for EuroWeekly in May. “When half the workforce earns under [$27,028] and the most common salary is barely above the minimum wage, then something is wrong,” he wrote, adding:

With rents in Barcelona and Madrid often exceeding [$1,389] per month, most people in Spain currently cannot afford to live alone, or even near their place of work. In many regions, the reality of people is as follows:

More adults live with their parents well into their 30s

Shared housing among working professionals is now the norm

Rural areas hollow out while cities stretch into unsustainable density

“Ultimately, people are leaving Spain to move to other European countries,” Salame wrote. The Spanish emigration is especially strong among better-educated youths with the greatest potential for growing productivity.

Faiola, the Washington Post‘s writer, briefly acknowledged that some people disagree with his one-sided view of cheap-labor migration:

Critics point to Spain’s unemployment rate — over 10 percent, the highest in the European Union, though less than half what it was a decade ago — as evidence that welcoming migrants is wrongheaded. They argue it suppresses wage growth, increases competition for Spanish workers and threatens Spanish identity. Some opinion polls also show a hardening public stance on migration.

But he spent more time pushing his fellow progressives’ pro-migration politics:

Sira Rego, a minister in [Spain’s socialist] government, said she was glad to see immigrants choosing Spain. “It makes me feel a certain pride because it represents the kind of country we want to build: a welcoming country with rights.”

Bezos’s Washington Post announced a new editorial organization in January 2025 to cover migration. It is headed by Jenna Johnson. So far, the editorial group has minimized coverage of migration’s impact on wages and college graduates’ careers.

In contrast, the New York Times’ pro-migration editors have been trying to recognize the costs of migration since Trump was elected for the second time.

Faiola also repeated the progressive sneer of local citizens who walk away from terrible jobs that low-status migrants must accept if they do not want to go back home: