Spain to legalise half a million undocumented migrants

An overwhelming parliamentary majority voted on Tuesday, April 9, to task the Spanish government with drafting a bill leading to the eventual legalisation of some 500 thousands undocumented migrants. The decision, based on a proposal by civil society actors, gives Pedro Sánchez's coalition up to six months to work on concrete measures to address the issue. 

Spain's Congreso de los diputados ('deputies' Congress'), the parliament's lower house, green-lit on Tuesday a landmark resolution that will pave the way for legalising hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants that were already residing in the country as of November 1, 2021 (somewhere between half a million and 300,000 individuals, according to various estimates). Such were the terms defined by the #RegularizaciónYa, the platform responsible for the collection of over 611,000 signatures and which constitutes a network of more than 900 civil society associations, rights groups and other NGOs that were behind the popular proposal.

How exactly said legalisation will take place, however, will be up for the political parties in Congress to determine. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's own Socialist party (PSOE) had already declared ahead of the vote that it will table some amendments to the draft bill's original formulation, but stopped short of providing any further detail about specific changes. The government's junior coalition partners, the Catalan socialist party (PSC) and Sumar (itself an electoral cartel of left-wing to radical-leftist parties), have also announced they strongly support the bill and will see to it that it stays unaltered throughout the legislative process. 

Unsurprisingly, the 33 elected members of the ultra-nationalist, anti-immigration Vox opposed the measure. But the real surprise was the last-minute change of heart of the main opposition party, the conservative Partido Popular (PP) which came out first in last July's general elections (winning 137 out of 350 seats) but could not command a parliamentary majority. PP's lawmakers' support for the decision was unsure until moments before the vote, with the centre-right party's spokesperson warning about the possibility of the bill functioning as a "pull factor" attracting even more migrants into the country. However, since the Spanish Catholic Church had called on all political parties to support the proposal in Congress, there were indications pointing to this conclusion. 

Madrid had already adopted a similar measure in 2005, when another Socialist administration (led by PM José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero) granted an amnesty to around 800,000 undocumented migrants. The citizen's initiative led by #RegularizaciónYa started in 2021 and surpassed the 500,000-signature threshold required to activate the parliamentary process in February 2023, but when the Congress debated the issue the following month opposition forces (including PP) voted the bill down. 

Spain registered an all-time record 21 million legal foreign workers in March 2024. Recent data compiled by the think-tank Funcas shows that the share of foreigners residing in Spain reached 18.1%, above the EU's average of 17.1%.

Continue reading on Europa Today.