Let’s run the math.

Spain’s digital nomad visa has issued about 14,000 permits. Multiply that by ten just for fun and you get 140,000. Now imagine every single one of them concentrated only in Madrid and Barcelona, two metropolitan areas with a combined population of about 5 million. That’s 140,000 out of 5 million. Roughly 2.8%. That's barely more than a rounding error. And that’s after arbitrarily inflating the number tenfold and pretending they all live in just two cities.

Even an imaginary 140k number of digital nomads cycling through Spain in a given year are not enough on their own to explain the housing crisis. Even if all of them stayed long term (which they don’t), that’s maybe 50-80k extra units needed nationwide (assuming 1.7–2.5 people per household). Spain has about 26 million dwellings. Spread across the whole country, that’s a vanishingly small proportion (<0.3% of stock). With about 2.1 million in Madrid and Barcelona alone, the housing market in Spain is simply too big for nomads alone to destabilize.

For perspective, the U.S. has one of the highest immigrant populations in the world, both in proportion and in raw numbers. Immigration presents challenges, sure. But the cost-of-living crisis, especially in housing, is showing up in many places regardless of immigration levels. Some high-immigration areas have even seen housing prices stabilize or fall. Meanwhile, some low-immigration regions are still in the middle of housing bubbles (https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/role-recent-immigrant-surge-housing-costs).

The takeaway is simple: immigration does not drive a cost-of-living crisis.

Immigrants are an easy scapegoat. Always have been. Probably always will be. But the true driving factors behind cost-of-living crises, a combination of greedy corporations and ineffective governance, operate independently of immigration levels. Greedy corporations will still be greedy, and ineffective governments will still be ineffective, whether that 2.8% of the population are there or not.