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SPAIN will launch a massive process of regularisation for hundreds of thousands undocumented immigrants.
Pedro Sanchez’s coalition has issued a Royal Decree that grants residency and working permits to approximately 500,000 people who are currently living in shadows.
According to the new rules for applying, applicants must show that they have been living in Spain for a minimum of five months, arrived before December 31st 2025 and have no criminal records.
A new report from the Funcas think tank suggests that the real number of irregular residents may be closer to 840,000.
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The population has increased by eightfold in the last year.
Data disproves the commonly held belief that irregular migrants primarily arrive on small boats, mainly from Africa.
Funcas says that most of the visitors arrive as tourists by plane and overstay their visas.
Majority of the number of applicants are from Colombia (290 000), Peru (110 000) and Honduras (90.000), with Africans making up only 6%.
This move is part a high stakes political survival agreement struck between Sanchez’s socialists (PSOE), and the extreme left Podemos party.
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Sanchez needs four votes from Podemos today to pass important decrees on transport and pensions.
By using a Royal Decree the government avoids the need to vote on the issue in Congress and bypasses a certain veto by the right-wing Partido Popular(PP), Vox and the Catalan Separatist Party Junts.
The opposition has launched a fierce attack on the decision.
Xavier Garcia Albiol, the PP Mayor of Badalona (Barcelona) who recently evicted a building of immigrant squatters into streets at the height of winter, branded the move ‘surrender and chaos’.
“Do you know that an irregular immigrant who has been in Spain for a year, if arrested 10 times for robbery… will be rewarded today with residency?” He posted on social networks.
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It is not a migration policy, it is total irresponsibility.
Other warn of wider implications for European Union.
Eva Poptcheva a specialist of EU affairs warned that residence in Spain allows free movement throughout the Schengen Zone.
She said that regularisation triggers the right to family reunification and allows beneficiaries to bring their dependents into Europe.
There are also deep concerns about the ‘pull effect’ benefiting human trafficking mafias.
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Alfonso Masoliver, a journalist and Africa specialist, argued that mass legalisations send the message that if one can enter illegally they will be eventually allowed to stay.
“The immediate effect is a draw effect that benefits mafias, who bring people to the Canaries with all of the horror and deaths that this entails,” said he.
Some supporters claim that the measure is a matter of economic common sense.
Ignasi guardans, a former lawyer and politician, said that by bringing them out of the illegal market, they become taxpayers.
“If they work as irregular immigrants… they are not paying taxes,” he said.
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The fact that they would pay them in the event of this measure being implemented is an argument for it.
Angel Villarino is a journalist who has also disputed the idea that this move was meant to buy votes from the Left.
He said that it takes nearly a decade for Latin American citizens to gain their citizenship and vote rights, and that Latin American voters tend to lean right.
The largest number of people who have been granted papers since the PSOE government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in 2005.
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