Spain considers regularising hundreds of thousands of migrants

The Spanish government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is finalising the details of a massive regularisation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants living in the country, in sharp contrast to the recent migration control plans of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

With the ultimate aim of regularising all migrants who arrived in Spain before 2024, the bill would ensure a significant reduction in the administrative deadlines for the temporary regularisation of immigrants whose asylum applications had previously been rejected, El País added.

In addition to Sumar, the new bill is supported by almost all of Sánchez’s parliament partners: the left-wing Catalan separatist party ERC, the Galician regional party BNG, the radical left Basque party EH Bildu, and the far-left Podemos party.

In 2023, it was estimated that there were 686,000 migrants in an irregular situation living in Spain, a figure that corresponds to about 17% of Spain’s non-EU population, according to a recent report by think tank Funcas. The current figure could be even higher.

The new law could even be supported by the main opposition party in parliament, the Partido Popolar (EPP), on the condition that regularisation is carried out on a ‘case-by-case’ basis and that it is not a process of ‘mass regularisation’ but ‘individualised’, party sources recently said.

This would not be the first regularisation of immigrants in Spain, although it would be the most ambitious in its aims.

In previous years, former prime ministers José María Aznar (PP) and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (PSOE) also introduced similar measures.

The news comes at a particularly complex time, after the Canary Islands and the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa saw record arrivals of immigrants last summer, in the case of the Canaries from West African countries.

On Sunday night, a migrant boat arrived off the coast of Gran Canaria with 231 people on board, including 58 minors and 13 women: a record number for the island, Canarias 7 reported.

While the Partido Popular and the far-right Vox party, the third force in parliament, accuse Sánchez of having a chaotic and erratic immigration policy, the Spanish prime minister defends the need for legal immigration to strengthen the country’s labour market and contribute to the sustainability of the Spanish pension system and welfare state.

According to the promoters of the new law, which is the result of a popular legislative initiative supported by several NGOs and left-wing parties, the new regularisation of immigrants could generate between €790 million and 950 million a year, ElDiario.es reported.