Spain is regularising half a million migrants as other governments shut the door. The backlash at home has been milder than many had feared.
Queues, long queues, have been a common sight in towns and cities across Spain this spring and early summer. In April, the country invited, for 10 weeks only, undocumented migrants to come forward and ask to stay, legally. More than 900,000 people have so far reportedly done so.
Undocumented migrants are common in a country with an uncommonly large shadow population. Spanish officials originally put the number of those eligible for its amnesty (those who can prove they have been in the country for at least five months) at around half a million people; Funcas, a think-tank, reckoned the undocumented number nearer 840,000. The actual, huge number of applications suggests that was a low estimate.
What is not so common is Spain’s timing. While America deports and Denmark, Germany and Austria compete to sound the most forbidding, Spain has offered outstretched arms. This is the country’s first immigration amnesty in 20 years, and it came not from on high but from the street: a campaign called Regularización Ya spent years collecting 700,000 signatures and the blessing of the Catholic Church before Pedro Sánchez, short of the votes to legislate, simply decreed it in April.
Elma Saiz, Spain’s migration minister, says that various studies on a previous regularisation of migrants in 2005 show positive results from this measure. “The measure contributed to formalising labour relations, improving the integration and labour mobility of those regularised, increasing tax revenue, and reducing the informal economy in sectors with intensive migrant labour.”
The government now wants to pull off the same trick. Spain’s working-age population is forecast to shrink 30 per cent by 2060; foreign workers have taken 43 per cent of the jobs created since the 2022 labour reform, mainly in agriculture, domestic work and hospitality, and more than three million of them now pay into social security. Prime Minister Sánchez likes to note that migrants generate a tenth of GDP and cost barely one per cent of public spending.
Sound but little fury
Spain’s opposition has disliked the amnesty from the start. “These half million legalised migrants will cause millions more to come, who will aggravate the collapse of healthcare, housing and our security,” said party leader Santiago Abascal. The predicted backlash, though, has yet to arrive, at least not at expected levels. According to data from the European Social Survey (ESS), Spanish public opinion on immigration stands out as notably positive in the European context.
Brussels meanwhile is unhappy but ultimately powerless. Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, reportedly clashed with Sanchez last week, claiming that the amnesty would have consequences beyond Spain’s borders. Nevertheless, migration is a national matter, as Magnus Brunner, the European commissioner responsible, conceded to the European parliament in February. Meloni’s fear (and that of others) is that a Spanish residence permit, good for access to the rest of the Schengen zone for 90 days at a time, will tempt some of those made newly legal to drift elsewhere. The bloc’s new migration pact, heavy on deportations and hard borders, takes effect this summer, just as Spain heads the other way.
Elma Saiz is undeterred. She has toured European capitals selling regularisation as hard economics rather than soft charity, and across a shrinking, greying continent the amnesty pitch may yet find takers, although none have yet come forward. “Spain is managing migration with positive results from an economic, employment, and social perspective,” she says.
For now the queues in Spain remain long and the deadline is close. Applications shut on June 30, and the offices that must judge them began the year with half a million cases already unresolved. Regularising so many migrants will take a long time. Judgement on whether the Spanish experiment is a success will take a lot longer.
Photo: Dreamstime.