The Council of Ministers approves this Tuesday the new regulations of the immigration law facilitate the regularization of migrants. Document approval seeks facilitate “orderly, legal and safe” migratory journeys through employment, training and family networks, in addition to simplifying the bureaucracy in this area.
Likewise, the objectives of this modification reduce delays, eliminate duplication of procedures, transpose several pending European directives and guarantee the human rights of all people who wish to regularize in Spain. This was reported by the Minister of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, Elma Saiz.
Furthermore, as a novelty, Saiz highlighted that the temporary authorizations will have an initial validity of one year and they will be renewable for four additional years, which, he added, “facilitates family reunification after one year and it is enough to renew it once before accessing long-term authorization”.
The reform also includes a specific section for visas, which will have an initial validity of one year to prevent people who request them from having greater coverage to prove their legal status in Spain.
Various immigration law reforms
This reform was first announced in December last year -it was initially expected that it would see the light of day in the first half of 2024- and last October the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, announced to Congress that it would finally reach the Council of Ministers in November. It had to be delayed due to DANA which hit the country at the end of October.
The current regulations date from 2011 and, since then, some modifications have been made, the last in 2022, to, among other novelties, create the figure of “roots for training”which allows those who have lived in Spain for two years to regularize their situation if they are training for a profession demanded by the labor market.
Last June, the minister presented a first draft of the reform currently being carried out, which, among other new features, reorganized the root figures, reducing in some cases the times of residence in Spain or the period of employment relationship in the required country and eliminating other requirements. According to the memory of this project, this modification seeks to respond to “the new demographic and work realities” of the country with a reform which allows “to improve legal and orderly access routes for foreigners outside the European Union”.
According to the minister, this will be done through three axes: employment, training and family networks. This reform is a different procedure from the negotiations carried out last year between the Government and the Canary Islands to modify, in this case, Article 35 of the Immigration Law with the aim of creating a mechanism for the reception of unaccompanied migrant minors among all autonomous communities.
And it also differs from the popular legislative initiative for the extraordinary regularization of foreigners, a proposal which aims benefit around half a million migrants who live in Spain without papers, is supported by more than 600,000 signatures and continues its treatment in the Congress of Deputies.
