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Majority of Spaniards want to welcome more refugees into Spain

The Local Spain
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Majority of Spaniards want to welcome more refugees into Spain
Photo: Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP

A majority of Spanish people feel the country is in a position to accept more migrants, a new poll shows, a finding which contrasts with more negative responses in other EU countries.

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French polling agency Ifop interviewed 1,000 people in six European countries to examine attitudes to migration across Europe in the context of an ongoing refugee crisis.

In Spain, the majority of people asked – 52 percent – disagreed with the statement "Our country already has a lot of foreigners or people of foreign origin and it is not possible to accommodate additional immigrants".

People spoken to in other European countries included in the survey displayed more pessimistic views towards their ability to cope with more immigration.

Nearly two thirds (63 percent) of people polled in France thought the country had already reached its upper limit in terms of migrant numbers while that figure was 63 percent in the Netherlands and 60 percent in the UK. 

At the other end of the scale, just 33 percent of Germans said their country couldn't deal with more migrants.

However, the Ifop survey also suggested that Spaniards were concerned by the financial impact of immigration.

Only 36 percent agreed that "our country has the economic and financial resources to welcome migrants", in contrast to 69 percent in Germany.

And while half of Germans polled said that immigration could help boost the national economy, only 33 percent of Spanish people felt the same way.

Germany came out as the most ‘migrant friendly’ of the countries surveyed, with two in three people survey respondents agreeing that their country could accommodate more migrants.

A total of 79 percent of Germans said that their country had a duty to accept those fleeing war and poverty, a figure which fell to 67 percent in Spain and just 54 percent in Great Britain.

Spain agreed to accept 14,931 refugees under a quota scheme devised by the EU in early September, but earlier this month it rejected German plans to implement a more permanent system of sharing refugees across the EU.

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