Spain launched one of the most significant immigration regularization rollouts in European history in 2026, offering undocumented migrants a legal pathway to residence and work permits, at a moment when most of the continent was moving sharply in the opposite direction. Around one million immigrants applied before the window closed on June 30, nearly double the government’s original estimate of 500,000 beneficiaries.
The program, announced in January and opened in April, offered immigrants without legal status a one-year renewable residence permit provided they had spent at least five months living in Spain and had a clean criminal record, the AP reported.
By mid-June, the Spanish government had received roughly 900,000 applications, with immigration experts and analysts expecting the final tally to exceed one million. Around 360,000 had already been successfully processed by that point, with the government given three months to work through the remaining applications submitted before the deadline.
The breakdown of applicants reflects the composition of Spain’s undocumented population. Colombians made up 30% of those who applied, unsurprising given around 980,000 Colombian-born nationals live in Spain.
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Moroccan nationals represented 14% of applicants, Venezuelans 10%, and Peruvians 9%. Key sectors of the Spanish economy, including agriculture, tourism, and the service sector, depend heavily on workers from Latin America and Africa.
The scale of the response underscores the size of Spain’s undocumented population and the degree to which informal labour has become embedded in the country’s economic fabric.
One in five Spanish residents was born outside the country, and Spain’s population of 50 million includes around 10 million people born elsewhere, many of them Colombians, Venezuelans, and Moroccans who fled violence, political instability, or sought better economic prospects.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez framed the measure in deliberately moral and economic terms. He called it “an act of justice and a necessity,” arguing that people already living and working in Spain should “do so under equal conditions” and pay taxes.
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Speaking to Spain’s parliament in 2024, Sánchez told lawmakers the country had to choose between being “an open and prosperous country or a closed-off, poor country,” and made the case that taking in migrants was not simply a matter of human decency but the only realistic way to grow the economy and sustain the welfare state in a country with one of the lowest birthrates in the European Union.
“In Spain, migration represents 25% of our per capita GDP, 10% of our social security revenues and only 1% of our public expenditure,” he told the Guardian in an interview last September.
The policy contrasts sharply with the direction of travel elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, where deportation efforts have accelerated.
Across the continent, centrist parties have increasingly adopted the language of the far right on immigration (pointing to Keir Starmer’s speech warning Britain risked becoming “an island of strangers”) and former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s declaration that Germany must “finally deport on a large scale those who have no right to stay.”
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Sánchez has consistently broken with that consensus. One of his first acts after becoming prime minister in 2018 was to announce Spain would welcome the 630 migrants on board the rescue boat Aquarius, after Italy and Malta refused them entry.
The Spanish right responded to the 2026 regularization with predictable hostility. The conservative People’s Party said the plan would attract more migrants and overwhelm public services, while the far-right Vox party accused Sánchez of trying to “replace the Spanish population and accelerate the invasion.”
Pablo Simón, a professor at Madrid’s Carlos III University, said that the regularization also served a political function for Sánchez at a difficult moment domestically: “Right now, Sánchez is in a very difficult position internally, but he also knows the only way he can survive is by shifting to more leftwing positions that will allow him to absorb the electorate of the smaller parties.”
It was not the first time Spain had moved in this direction. This was the seventh mass legalization in Spain’s modern history. The first three carried out under Socialist Prime Minister Felipe González from 1986 onward, two more under conservative José Aznar’s government in the 2000s, and one under Sánchez in 2005, which regularized 576,500 immigrants in what was, until now, the largest such instance. The 2026 program has eclipsed all of them.
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For those who spent years campaigning for it, the significance goes well beyond the politics. Edith Espínola, one of the advocates who pushed for the regularization, said the following: “It gives you the opportunity to study, to be able to work with dignity and to be able to report when you’re being exploited without having to be scared about making a complaint. It means that you can break through that invisible border.”
