Vaclav Smil, Distinguished Professor at the University of Manitoba offers a general overview on Immigration in Europe and Spain. He starts by making general observations on immigration. He gives some examples of pull and push economic factors of immigration, such as fertility rate or integration factors. He then discusses the so-called "war-caused immigration" and concludes the speech talking about the difficulty to know what will happen in the future due to the complexity of the immigration issue.

Vaclav Smil studied in an interdisciplinary program at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Carolinum University in Prague (RNDr) and at the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences of the Pennsylvania State University (PhD). Currently he is a Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba. He has published more than 25 books (not counting translations to Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Norwegian) and more than 300 papers in about 80 different energy, environmental, Asian studies and general science periodicals (ranging from American Scientist to World Development and from Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to Scientific American), and in more than 30 edited volumes. His interdisciplinary research interests encompass a broad area of energy, environmental, food, population, economic and public policy studies. Since the early 1970s he has also applied these approaches to energy, food and environmental affairs of China.