Across Europe and the United States, governments have been steadily ramping up deportation campaigns and tightening restrictions on irregular migration, driven in part by rising far-right political influence. But this week, Spain’s left-wing administration has carved out a dramatically different path, moving forward with a landmark plan to legalize hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers already living and contributing to the country’s economy.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist-led government announced Tuesday that it would grant legal status to roughly 500,000 unauthorized people working in Spain. It marks the first large-scale regularisation of undocumented migrants in the country in more than two decades, and a policy that grows directly from grassroots pressure: the plan originated as a citizen-led initiative that gathered 700,000 signatures and earned backing from hundreds of civil society organizations, including the Catholic Church.
Eligibility for the new renewable one-year residence permits is broadly structured: foreign nationals with no criminal record who entered Spain before the end of 2025, can prove at least five months of continuous residence in the country, or submitted asylum applications before December 31 of last year all qualify to apply.
Contrary to popular narratives that frame undocumented migration as a chaotic crisis driven by dangerous border crossings, most of the people set to benefit from this reform did not enter Spain irregularly. Many arrived legally on short-term visas and overstayed their documentation to take informal cash-in-hand work in the country’s large underground economy. These workers fill critical gaps across key sectors of Spain’s economy: they work on construction sites, harvest crops on agricultural farms, staff shops and restaurants, and provide domestic care for children, elderly and disabled households. Most hail from Spain’s former colonial territories in Latin America, including Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador, as well as neighboring North African nation Morocco.
Sanchez’s policy stands in stark opposition to the hardening consensus on migration that has taken hold across much of the transatlantic world in recent years. In the European Union, member states backed harsh new migration rules last December that would allow for the deportation of rejected asylum seekers to offshore processing hubs or third countries with no connection to the applicants. In France, official data shows deportations of undocumented people rose in 2025, while the number of undocumented migrants granted pathways to legal status and work dropped.
Unlike political leaders who frame undocumented migration as a drain on public resources, Sanchez has framed regularisation as a tool to strengthen Spain’s social safety net, which faces growing strain from the country’s rapidly ageing native population. The prime minister argues that bringing 500,000 informal workers into the formal economy will expand tax and social security contributions, shoring up a system struggling to support an ageing population with a shrinking native working-age cohort.
Jasmijn Slootjes, deputy director of Migration Policy Institute Europe, explained that the reform is rooted in pragmatic demographic and economic realities. Spain has the lowest fertility rate in Europe, making long-term demographic decline a pressing policy concern, and the country has faced widespread labour and skill shortages across multiple sectors that undocumented workers are already filling informally.
“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,” Slootjes noted.
The reform was part of a governing agreement between Sanchez’s Socialist Party and its former coalition partner, the far-left Podemos party, and frames migration as a core driver of Spain’s continued economic prosperity. Recent economic data appears to back up the government’s framing: official figures released Tuesday show that 52,500 of the 76,200 net new jobs added in the final quarter of 2025 were filled by foreign-born workers. The same quarter saw Spain hit its lowest unemployment rate in 18 years.
Slootjes said the economic and social benefits of migration have been the core argument for the reform, and empirical evidence aligns with the government’s position. She highlighted a defining quote from Sanchez that sums up the administration’s approach: “Spain needs to choose between being an open and prosperous country, or a closed-off and poor country.”
