Why Spain is offering amnesty to 500,000 undocumented migrants

With a few scratches of a pen, Spain’s Socialist-led government is preparing to grant legal status to roughly half a million people now living and working in the country without documentation.

Foreign nationals with clean criminal records who arrived before the end of 2025, and who can prove they’ve lived in Spain for at least five months, will soon be eligible for renewable one-year residence permits. People who applied for asylum in the country before December 31 will also be able to apply. Migration Minister Elma Saiz said Tuesday that she expects applications to open April through June. 

This extraordinary mass regularisation – the first in Spain in more than 20 years – was born from a citizen-backed proposal signed by some 700,000 people and supported by hundreds of civil society groups, including the Catholic Church. 

While most immigrants in Spain have legal status, the country’s booming economy has also drawn hundreds of thousands of largely working-age people from across the world to work in the country’s underground economy. Undocumented migrants work on construction sites, on farms, in shops and restaurants or in people's homes, cooking and cleaning and caring for children. 

The bulk of these workers come from the country’s former colonial holdings across Latin America and North Africa such as Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and nearby Morocco. 

And while footage of migrants scrambling over the barbed-wire fences surrounding Spain’s North African exclaves or lurching towards the Canary Islands in flimsy dinghies weigh heavily on the public imagination, the reality is usually less dramatic.

Most undocumented migrants are people who entered Spain legally, going on to overstay their visas and find cash-in-hand work in what has become known as the country’s “black economy”. 

Bucking the trend

The decision sits in stark contrast to a hardening approach to irregular immigration that has flourished across Europe and the US in recent years as the far right gains ground. 

Despite declining numbers of irregular arrivals, European Union states in December last year backed harsher migration measures that would allow rejected asylum seekers to be deported to offshore “return hubs” or countries with which they have no connection.   

In France, last year’s figures show rising numbers of deportations paired with fewer cases of undocumented migrants being granted legal pathways to work. 

Read moreHow France’s far right changed the debate on immigration

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has maintained that – far from being a drain on the country’s social services as critics claim – migrants play a crucial role in keeping the country’s welfare state standing. Bringing half a million workers into the formal economy, he argues, will only strengthen the country’s social security system.

Migration Policy Institute Europe deputy director Jasmijn Slootjes said that Spain’s decision was partly in response to fears that the ageing native-born population won’t be capable of sustaining the kind of workforce the country needs to thrive.    

“If you look at the demographic decline, the fertility rate in Spain is the lowest in Europe – so it's really, really low,” she said.

“There were a lot of skill shortages, labour shortages, and de facto a lot of irregular migrants are working, although in informal work. And through regularising you can, of course, get more tax payments, and you also get better matching [to] their skills – because people can actually work at their skill level. So it’s a very pragmatic approach.”

She said that the Sanchez government – which announced this decision as part of a deal struck with its erstwhile coalition partners, the leftist PODEMOS party – was championing migration as a fundamental driver of the country’s flourishing economy.  

Official data released on Tuesday indicated that 52,500 of the 76,200 people who raised employment numbers in the final quarter of 2025 were born overseas, with that same quarter marking Spain's lowest unemployment rate in 18 years.

“That’s really something that's being mentioned time and again – this link to the economy, maintaining social welfare access and a healthy, competitive country. That is really a core argument in all of this, and the evidence is indeed pointing that way,” Slootjes said.

“I think one quote of [Sanchez's] is very clear in clarifying their approach – he says, ‘Spain needs to choose between being an open and prosperous country, or a closed-off and poor country’,” she said.

Since the last mass regularisation in 2005 – the sixth such amnesty since the fall of the Franco dictatorship – Spain has pursued a less dramatic approach to undocumented migrants, offering them a step-by-step pathway over several years towards gaining a legal right to live, work and eventually become a Spanish citizen. 

'Sanchez hates the Spanish people'

Despite a turbulent 20 years of boom and bust as Spain weathered the 2008 global financial crisis and then the Covid-19 pandemic, the country has largely avoided the rising anti-immigration sentiment that has pushed far-right parties into prominence – and sometimes power – across Europe and beyond. 

That changed in 2018 with the arrival of Vox on the political scene. Born out of a broader backlash to Catalan separatism, the far-right party won the third-most seats in parliament in 2019 on an increasingly anti-immigration platform.

Unsurprisingly, Vox party leader Santiago Abascal was incensed by the announcement. 

“The tyrant Sanchez hates the Spanish people. He wants to replace them,” he posted on social media, adding that Sanchez wants to "accelerate the invasion”, echoing oft-repeated right-wing narratives. 

Abascal instead called for “remigration” – another far-right rallying cry that champions the mass deportation of people born overseas, sometimes including naturalised citizens.

Read moreSpain's far-right resurgence raises spectre of Franco 50 years after his death

Alberto Nunez Feijoo, leader of the conservative People’s Party – which oversaw several of the amnesties in previous decades – has also criticised the decision, as the party struggles to head off rising support for the anti-immigration Vox. 

Support for immigration remains 'largely stable'

Slootjes said that while Spain was not immune from the rising tide of nativist sentiment, levels of anti-immigration feeling had not reached the same heights as in other parts of Europe.  

“Spain is also witnessing similar trends that we’ve been seeing in other countries in Europe and also across the Atlantic, of course, which is this increasing restrictive narrative around migration and a rise of support for the far right,” she said.

“This is really a moment where Vox is very vocal and really pushing this issue. So for those who are anti-migrant and agree with them, of course this can bolster their support." 

Spanish think-tank Funcas in May last year found that local support for immigration was among the highest in Europe, with just 28 percent of respondents favouring restricted immigration in 2024. Those attitudes appeared to endure even as the country reeled from mass unemployment in the wake of the 2008 crash. 

"Even during years when unemployment exceeded 25 percent, support for immigration remained largely stable," the report said. 

And with more and more countries across Europe facing similar demands for workers, giving those people already practicing their livelihoods without legal protections a pathway out of precarity could well be a way forward, she noted. 

“It's food for thought for policymakers across Europe and across the world, especially as this competition for talent and skill shortages, and ageing and demographic decline are plaguing our economies and societies, and it will all ramp up,” she said. “So it's going to be interesting to see how this may become more of a tool in the future, maybe if the tides are shifting and Spain is really testing it out and really creating this evidence to build future policies on how to do it – and how to do it well.”