Spain's Mass Regularization of Migrants
How to legalize 1.2 million people
Well, it’s summer.
Here in Spain, that means a slow news season.
I guess we’ve got a few more weeks of World Cup football before that closes down, and everybody goes to the beach.
But in the meantime, we’ve got some stories that are too big to ignore.
For today, let’s talk about Spain’s mass regularization of migrants, which ended on June 30th – or at least the deadline for applications did – with a surprising 1.2 million applications. Maybe more, in the final recount.
In case you haven’t been following, the regularization is a controversial plan to give work and residence permits to anyone in Spain illegally (or seeking asylum here) on or before Dec 31, 2025.
Applications opened a few months ago, in April. Now they’re closed. And the number of people who applied exceeded all official expectations.
The government claimed that there would be maybe 500,000 applications. In the end, there were more than double that number. So what happened?
Simple: the Spanish government lied to us (again)
Here’s what happened: the Spanish government lied.
For one thing, I knew the 500,000 number was bullshit. I even said so, in an article I published on January 30th.
In fact, the idea that there are only 500,000 illegal immigrants in Spain could be disproven by a walk around any Spanish city.
Half a million would have been about 1% of the population in some sort of “irregular” status – and it was obvious that there were more than that.
Now the government is saying, “Well, yes, we knew it was well over a million but we didn’t say anything". That’s not a direct quote, of course. But to summarize, an unpopular government pushed through an unpopular measure by lying about it.
A report by the National Police from earlier this year predicted 1.25 million applications for the regularization. It was ignored.
Today, the news site El Español reports that the police found hundreds of people arriving at the Spanish coast on rafts, with fake documentation in hand “proving” they were in Spain all along. It’s provided by the mafias.
The Spanish health system, on their end, had 1.2 million sin papeles registered to receive healthcare last year. Surely this data was available to Pedro Sánchez.
He just lied about the whole thing.
Which isn’t surprising, considering everything else going on his his party.
An interlude about day-to-day life in Barcelona
The Barcelona Metro is a melting pot of people from all over the world, plus the occasional local.
I take it almost daily, to go to the gym, and it’s obvious that more than 1% of the people on there are “irregular migrants” – AKA illegal immigrants.
The beggars and buskers on Barcelona’s public transport would be worth an article on their own. But if you want to know how a guy like me decides there are more than half a million irregular migrants in Spain, the answer is that I just look around.
Even if I’m wrong about a lot of people (and I surely am) it doesn’t matter.
Remember, I used to be illegal here myself.
So I make an educated guess, and I’m right enough of the time.
A lot of people in Barcelona are foreign-looking and also seem to have very precarious positions in society. By that, I mean scrap metal collectors, squatters, delivery riders, and the like. There are plenty of them around.
They’re the ones I tend to assume are “irregular”.
People I see daily, getting regular
In a previous article, I mentioned the Moroccan guy at my gym who came in one day with his police background check for the regularization.
He’s someone I would have thought was legal: he speaks good Spanish, and seems to be pretty integrated in local culture.
(For example, one of his big topics of conversation is Barça football, and his phone case is an advertisement for a weed club. I just assumed he’d been here for 15 years, or maybe more. Maybe his whole life.)
On the other hand, there’s a flat two doors down from mine with an indeterminate number of Latin people living there. This is on my floor, so I see people going in and out a lot.
One guy who appeared there several months ago was downstairs the other day, talking to la portera. As I walked past, he said, “I’m waiting for a letter from Immigration. Make sure to call me as soon as it arrives!”
(La portera is the woman who cleans the staircases, opens the door, and collects packages for the people in our building. I can’t bring myself to use the word doorwoman, and concierge sounds way too fancy for what she’s doing. So we’re using the Spanish word: portera.)
Anyway, this Latin guy is someone I also would have assumed was legal. He looks sensitive, and fashionable. Doesn’t tick any of the “irregular migrant” boxes on my mental checklist. But there are a very limited number of reasons one would be waiting for a letter from Immigration.
So that’s two people I see almost daily. Already well over 1% of the people I know, here in Barcelona, are getting regularized.
What is Spanishness, anyway?
Keep in mind here that the Spanish immigration-to-nationality pipeline has been working for a long time. Twenty years ago you could look around and guess with some accuracy who’s Spanish and who’s not.
These days, we have several million non-native Spaniards. I’m one of them. So you have to take that into account when you see random non-Spanish-looking people around town: they may, in fact, be naturalized Spaniards.
This applies to Latin people, but also to Moroccans and to some number of Subsaharan Africans. (The first person I ever met who had been nationalized Spanish was a girl from Equatorial Guinea.)
I’m sure some of the Chinese have been around long enough to get Spanish nationality at this point. And their kids too.
Are the Pakistanis running the shop downstairs actually Spanish? They might be. When I took the Spanish language test for the nationality process, three quarters of the people taking it with me were Pakistani.
Or maybe Bangladeshi. It’s hard to tell.
I try not to assume too much about people. But one of my overall assumptions about Spanish life is that the amount of bureaucracy is insane, and at least half of society is actively trying to get around it, and therefore living semi-legal lives, in some way.
Mass Regularization in the Courts
Now I guess we’ll see if the courts have any objections to the mass regularization.
The Spanish Supreme Court said last week that they might bring the whole thing in front of the European Union – maybe some EU regulations were violated.
I find it frustrating when Spanish governments claim they can’t do anything without the EU’s approval, but then they go and do things that nobody wanted unilaterally.
The classic one is daylight saving time, which Sánchez’s government claims to need a 27 country consensus to get rid of.
This mass regularization is an example of the opposite: they’ve done the whole thing without the EU, and apparently they’re just hoping the courts are too slow to stop it.
Spain’s “Ley de Nietos” controversy
In the meantime, the Popular Party opposition is also objecting to the Ley de Nietos, which is giving Spanish nationality to the grandchildren of Spaniards who left the country during the mid-20th century.
The idea is that a lot of people were exiled during the Spanish Civil War and subsequent dictatorship, and that this law will give their descendants the right to come back to Spain.
The opposition now claims that this is a Socialist plot to rig future elections, because these “nietos” are registering to vote in towns they’ve never lived in.
There are plenty of places out in España Vacía where a dozen votes would swing an election. But I hesitate to assume that Pedro Sánchez is capable of a high level of devious plotting.
I also don’t really believe that the mass regularization is a devious plot to rig elections, because I’m not at all sure that “immigrants naturally vote for the left”.
The left tends to assume this. But I’ve actually talked to immigrants. Hundreds of them. And most them are more conservative than you’d expect.
The other day I met a guy from Cuba who – when he found out I’m from the US – said, “I like Trump. I wish the US would annex Cuba and make it part of Florida. That would be the best thing that’s ever happened to us!”
You can agree or disagree with that statement. (It’s pretty much the exact opposite of what I was expecting him to say.)
But either way, I doubt that guy will be going out and voting for Pedro Sánchez or the Spanish left.
Towards a Spanish melting pot
My personal opinions on immigration are rather nuanced.
It’s often good for the economy, but there are several things other than the economy that I think are important to people’s quality of life – and immigration’s impact on the “other things” is mixed.
El País is claiming that this million-plus addition to the population practically guarantees Spain’s 2% economic growth through 2030.
Well, okay. But I wonder if your “legacy Spaniards” would make that trade-off willingly. And if so, how many times?
When 2034 rolls around, and Pedro Sánchez’s government (now in its 16th year) might just say, “Listen, we need another 10 million illegals to juice the GDP a bit, so we can stay ahead of Italy…”
What will people think then?
They’ll probably think the same thing they’ve been thinking for my entire time in Spain – that the empty suits in Parliament are corrupt, out of touch, and get away with almost anything.
They’re thinking that there’s nothing much they can do, because the other parties are the same… or worse.
At least we’re (usually) good at football
But 2034 is also a World Cup year.
And right now there’s some 12-year-old playing football in a depressed suburb outside Madrid, or Barcelona, or Valencia. He’s from some country I can’t locate on a map.
But he’s really good at kicking that ball. And in eight years, he’ll be Spain’s great hope – for football anyway.
There is no hope for Spanish politics.
Yours,
Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.
P.S. Returning to a previous topic, Latin people here in Spain might also have a passport from some other EU country, and just choose to live in Spain instead. For example, my friend Pedro is from Brazil, but his passport says he’s Italian. His last name is German. And he’s in Barcelona. In other words, a lot of countries have complex melting-pot-type national identities. The new thing is that Spain is one of them.