As much of Europe pulls up the drawbridge, Spain is doing something close to the opposite.
A flood of applications
A program letting undocumented migrants regularize their status drew a response that outran the government's own forecasts. Officials had estimated about 500,000 eligible residents; by the June 30 deadline, migrant-rights organizations estimated the total had passed one million, with hundreds of thousands of applications confirmed by the government as the window closed. The demand overwhelmed the rollout at times, crashing the application portal on opening day and forming long lines outside post offices in provincial capitals.
How it works
Approved by royal decree in April and open for roughly ten weeks, the scheme requires applicants to show continuous residence in Spain for at least five months before the start of 2026, to be adults, and to have no recent criminal record, according to the Spanish government. One track covers people who filed asylum claims by the end of 2025; a broader track covers other undocumented residents who meet the residency test. A notable feature is speed: successful applicants can begin working legally within about two weeks of their application being admitted, with one-year, renewable residence-and-work permits to follow. The measure won backing from an unusually broad coalition, including employers' groups, labor unions and the Catholic Church.
The government's case
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has framed the program as both just and economically necessary, arguing that people already working in Spain's informal economy should do so on equal terms and pay into the system. His government points to labor and demographic pressures: officials say foreign workers have filled a large share of the jobs created since Spain's labor reform, and warn that a shrinking, aging population threatens long-term growth without continued immigration. It is Spain's seventh such regularization in four decades, and its first since 2005.
A divided politics, against the European tide
The right and far right have attacked the plan. The center-right Popular Party questioned the rigor of the vetting, insisting that anyone with a criminal record must be excluded, while the far-right Vox party cast the policy in incendiary terms that the government and mainstream civil society rejected. The debate places Spain conspicuously out of step with much of the European Union, where governments have moved to tighten asylum rules and border controls after a run of elections shaped by anti-immigration politics. Spain's wager is a different one — that legalizing people already on its soil, and counting on their labor, serves its economy and society better than leaving them in the shadows.
