SOURCE: FRANCE 24– As countries on both sides of the Atlantic ramp up deportations of undocumented migrants, Spain’s left-wing government on Tuesday prepared to give legal status to hundreds of thousands of irregular workers. Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has championed the amnesty as a way to not only give informal workers legal protections, but to also bring more money into a social security system increasingly under stress by the country’s ageing population.
With a few scratches of a pen, Spain’s Socialist-led government on Tuesday prepared to grant legal status to roughly half a million people now living and working in the country without documentation.
Foreign nationals with clean criminal records who arrived before the end of 2025, and who can prove they’ve lived in Spain for at least five months, are now eligible for renewable one-year residence permits. People who applied for asylum in the country before December 31 will also be able to apply.
This extraordinary mass regularisation – the first in Spain in more than 20 years – was born from a citizen-backed proposal signed by some 700,000 people and supported by hundreds of civil society groups, including the Catholic Church.
While most immigrants in Spain have legal status, the country’s booming economy has also drawn hundreds of thousands of largely working-age people from across the world to work in the country’s underground economy. Undocumented migrants work on construction sites, on farms, in shops and restaurants or in people’s homes, cooking and cleaning and caring for children.
Spain bets on migration to drive economic growth, bucking European trend
The bulk of these workers come from the country’s former colonial holdings across Latin America and North Africa such as Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and nearby Morocco.
And while footage of migrants scrambling over the barbed-wire fences surrounding Spain’s North African exclaves or lurching towards the Canary Islands in flimsy dinghies weigh heavily on the public imagination, the reality is usually less dramatic.
Most undocumented migrants are people who entered Spain legally, going on to overstay their visas and find cash-in-hand work in what has become known as the country’s “black economy”.
Bucking the trend
The decision sits in stark contrast to a hardening approach to irregular immigration that has flourished across Europe and the US in recent years as the far right gains ground.
Despite declining numbers of irregular arrivals, European Union states in December last year backed harsher migration measures that would allow rejected asylum seekers to be deported to offshore “return hubs” or countries with which they have no connection.
In France, last year’s figures show rising numbers of deportations paired with fewer cases of undocumented migrants being granted legal pathways to work.
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Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has maintained that – far from being a drain on the country’s social services as critics claim – migrants play a crucial role in keeping the country’s welfare state standing. Bringing half a million workers into the formal economy, he argues, will only strengthen the country’s social security system.
Migration Policy Institute Europe deputy director Jasmijn Slootjes said that Spain’s decision was partly in response to fears that the ageing native-born population won’t be capable of sustaining the kind of workforce the country needs to thrive.
“If you look at the demographic decline, the fertility rate in Spain is the lowest in Europe – so it’s really, really low,” she said.
“There were a lot of skill shortages, labour shortages, and de facto a lot of irregular migrants are working, although in informal work. And through regularising you can, of course, get more tax payments, and you also get better matching [to] their skills – because people can actually work at their skill level. So it’s a very pragmatic approach.”
She said that the Sanchez government – which announced this decision as part of a deal struck with its erstwhile coalition partners, the leftist PODEMOS party – was championing migration as a fundamental driver of the country’s flourishing economy.
Official data released on Tuesday indicated that 52,500 of the 76,200 people who raised employment numbers in the final quarter of 2025 were born overseas, with that same quarter marking Spain’s lowest unemployment rate in 18 years.
“That’s really something that’s being mentioned time and again – this link to the economy, maintaining social welfare access and a healthy, competitive country. That is really a core argument in all of this, and the evidence is indeed pointing that way,” Slootjes said.
“I think one quote of [Sanchez’s] is very clear in clarifying their approach – he says, ‘Spain needs to choose between being an open and prosperous country, or a closed-off and poor country’,” she said.
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