Spain approves decree to regularise half a million undocumented migrants

Spain’s socialist-led coalition government has approved a decree it said would regularise 500,000 undocumented migrants and asylum seekers, rejecting the anti-migration policies and rhetoric prevalent across much of Europe.The decree, expected to come into effect in April, will apply to hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and people in Spain with irregular status. To qualify for regularisation, applicants will have to prove they do not have a criminal record and had lived in Spain for at least five months – or had sought international protection – before 31 December 2025.Announcing the decision after Tuesday’s weekly cabinet meeting, Elma Saiz, Spain’s minister for inclusion, social security and migration, said it was a “historic day”, adding the initiative was designed to “break the bureaucratic barriers of the past”.Saiz said the programme, which is being brought in by royal decree, meaning it does not require parliamentary approval, would benefit Spain as a whole. “We’re reinforcing a migratory model based on human rights, on integration and on coexistence that’s compatible with both economic growth and social cohesion,” she said.The decree followed pressure from the socialists’ former allies in the leftwing Podemos party, which has a fraught relationship with the government.“We reached a deal with the [socialist party] for the extraordinary regularisation of undocumented people,” Podemos’s leader, Ione Belarra, wrote on social media on Tuesday morning. “No one else has to work without rights … Today and always, yes we can!”The ageing population is one of the reasons that migrants have been welcomed in Spain. Photograph: Pablo Garcia/The GuardianIn recent years, Spain has become a European outlier on migration. Addressing parliament in October 2024, the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said the country was at a demographic crossroads and needed migration to grow its economy and sustain its welfare state.“Throughout history, migration has been one of the great drivers of the development of nations while hatred and xenophobia have been – and continue to be – the greatest destroyer of nations,” he said. “The key is in managing it well.”The announcement was welcomed by the Brussels-based Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (Picum).“Today’s decision by the Spanish government to adopt a broad regularisation measure is a powerful reminder that regularisation is not only possible – it works, and it’s the right thing to do,” said Laetitia Van der Vennet, a senior advocacy officer at Picum.“For thousands of undocumented people who have built their lives in Spain, this could mean dignity, stability and access to basic rights. At a time when a hostile environment against migrants is spreading on both sides of the Atlantic, this move shows both humanity and common sense. We hope more governments will follow this example and invest in policies that protect, empower and include people, and make societies stronger.”The decision also drew approval from Spain’s Regularisation Now! movement, which added it had come “in an international context marked by the tightening of immigration policies, border closures, and the criminalisation of migrants in much of Europe”.However, the move has been bitterly criticised by the conservative People’s party (PP) – even though the party ordered similar initiatives when in government – and by the far-right Vox party.The PP’s leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, accused the prime minister of using the announcement to deflect attention from the government’s response to last week’s deadly rail crash, in which at least 45 people died. “Sánchez’s first response is a massive regularisation to distract attention, to increase the pull effect and to overwhelm our public services,” he said. “In socialist Spain, illegality is rewarded.”Vox – which is rising in the polls and outflanking the PP on the right with an explicitly anti-migrant discourse – went further, using familiar tropes about the great replacement theory and urging the mass deportation of migrants, euphemistically referred to by the far right as “remigration”.“Five hundred thousand illegals!” said its leader, Santiago Abascal. “Sánchez the tyrant hates the Spanish people. He wants to replace them – that’s why he’s using a decree to promote the pull effect and to accelerate the invasion. He must be stopped. Repatriations, deportations and remigration.”Regularisation programmes have long been used across the EU, with 43 put in place by more than a dozen countries between 1996 and 2008. In Spain, nine such programmes have been carried out since the country’s return to democracy, with the PP conducting more regularisation programmes than any other party.The roots of the current push lie in a citizen’s initiative, signed by more than 700,000 people and backed by about 900 social organisations, presented to parliament in 2024.High rates of migration to Spain have helped push unemployment levels to their lowest since 2008, and migrants have plugged the gaps in a labour market caused by an ageing population.Even some of the most ardent critics of immigration have conceded its necessity: in June, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, the far-right leader who has long called irregular migrants a threat to Europe’s future, said her government would issue nearly 500,000 new work visas for non-EU nationals in the coming years, in addition to the 450,000 granted since she took power.