Spain has not approved an extraordinary regularization of undocumented foreigners since 2005, when more than 575,000 work and residence permits were granted over four months, the majority to Ecuadorian, Moroccan and Romanian migrants. Since then, despite massive arrivals in recent years, the process has stopped.
Congress has a popular legislative initiative (ILP) underway to regularize 500,000 irregular migrants who have been residing in Spain for years, but the text accumulates eight extensions of the amendment deadline and has not finished starting. This Monday it returns, although parliamentary sources already predict that it will continue “stuck in a drawer”perhaps “during the entire legislature”.
This is important because, if the path of regularization is chosen, Congress is the only possible means. nine times that Spain has approved a similar measure – five times with the PP and four with the PSOE – have all passed through the Chamber.
This time it will not be so simple, mainly because of the criticisms that have arisen from Pedro Sánchez’s management of immigration. In the PP, especially, the position has disappeared tailgating in recent months —especially since the Catalan and European elections— even considering possible expulsions of illegal immigrants.
So, if regularization is not chosen, parliamentary sources warn that there is another way directwhich is the one of the nature letterThe Government does not have the capacity to regularize undocumented foreigners, but it does have the power to give them nationality. This has never been done on a large scale and, at the moment, Moncloa is not proposing it either.
500,000 beneficiaries
Returning to the initiative that is continuing its course in Congress, the ILP text that is continuing its course in Congress aims to legalize the situation of foreigners who, before the November 1, 2021resided in Spanish territory. The estimated reference figure is that it could benefit almost 500,000 migrants, which would make it the second largest in history after that of 2005.
The Funcas analysis centre, for its part, estimates that around 700,000 people Foreigners are already living in an irregular situation in Spain, although it is noted that the vast majority of them come from Latin America and not Africa.
This figure, that of 2023, is 32.67% higher than that observed in 2021, when the same entity estimated this figure at 517,149 people, and more than five times higher than that observed in 2017, when it counted 127,066 irregular immigrants.
Government sources stress that Spain will need from 200,000 to 250,000 migrant workers per year until 2050 to support the welfare state, due to the expected decrease in local contributions.
Nine antecedents
In Spain, nine regularizations of foreign citizens have been approved since the beginning of democracy, five promoted by the PP and four by the PSOE. The last of them, in 2005, was the most extensive, when the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero provided the documents to 576,506 workers non-community.
The rest of the socialist regularizations all came from the hand of Felipe González in 1986, 1991 and 1992. In total, they were approved. 152,717 requests extraordinary, even if the last of them required being a “dependent family member” of one of the foreigners regularized during the previous procedures.
For its part, José María Aznar’s PP promoted its first regularization process upon its arrival at Moncloa, in 1996, and upon its revalidation, in 2000. They were followed by three others (all in 2021) including regularization “by roots”, as its Executive defined it. In total, the administration popular ease 524,621 regularizations extraordinary.
