Spain’s Immigration Gamble

By legalising half a million migrants, the Spanish government is making a demographic and political gamble. Will its continued parliamentary survival be worth it? By Kaiser Bauch.

by Kaiser Bauch

Spain: All-in on red? Image: Grok

A long queue of young Pakistani men stands for hours in front of the Pakistani consulate in Barcelona. They are waiting to receive confirmation that their home country has provided the consulate with a clean criminal record—one of the requirements to be eligible for Spain’s newest large-scale regularisation scheme for illegal immigrants.

This would grant residency and work permits to all foreigners who arrived before December 31, 2025, have lived in Spain for at least five months, and have no criminal record. It is expected to benefit up to 500.000 people.

Such a regularisation gives migrants legal residence, the right to work, access to healthcare and social protection, freedom from deportation, protection from exploitation, and a pathway to permanent status—transforming them from undocumented workers into fully legal residents.

“I didn’t expect this country to be so good—the weather, the people, the culture,” said Hussain Dar, a 30-year-old Pakistani man who has been trying to survive in Spain without documents for almost a year and has at times been on the edge of homelessness. “Viva España! Viva [Spanish PM] Pedro Sánchez! We love that guy,” he shouted ecstatically. Well, who can blame him, really?

It sometimes seems that Spain follows its own distinct rhythm, slightly out of sync with the rest of the continent. It is the only major European country that underwent a bloody civil war (from which Franco emerged as the victor), remained neutral in both world wars, and managed to transition to a democracy only in the 1970s.

Today, much of an economically sluggish Europe—from the UK to Germany—is convulsed by growing anti-immigration sentiment.

Spain’s approach to immigration—and, to a certain extent, its entire political system, still dominated by large socialist and Christian democratic people’s parties—seems firmly rooted in the late-1990s Fukuyama-era “managed migration” consensus.

Low Fertility, Booming Population

While not highlighted by the media as often as other major European recipients of large-scale immigration such as the UK, Sweden, or Germany, Spain has in fact been one of Europe’s immigration champions.

As of 2024, the country has the seventh-largest immigrant population in the world in absolute numbers—about 9.5 million people, representing roughly 20% of its population.

Historically, Spain was a country of emigration. From the mid-19th until the mid-20th century, around 2.5 million people left Spain for its former colonies in Latin America and, to a lesser extent, North Africa.

Another 500,000 refugees fled during the Spanish Civil War, and between 1950 and 1970 about 2 million Spanish workers moved to other European countries such as Germany or Switzerland. The pattern began to slowly reverse in the 1970s, but the real boom came in the 21st century—and although there was a slowdown after the 2008 economic crisis, it has never really stopped.

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Massive levels of immigration are the obvious key to the seeming paradox of Spanish demographics. Spain’s fertility rate has been abysmally low since the 1980s, yet even though Spain’s fertility rate has hovered around 1.3 children per woman for almost 40 years, its population has grown by more than 10 million people over the same period. Spain’s average annual population growth has been higher than that of the UK or Sweden and very close to that of the United States.

Part of this population growth, especially in the early years of the 21st century, was driven by so-called demographic momentum—the tendency of a population to grow even with sub-replacement fertility. Most of that has been caused by mass immigration. Demographers estimate that without immigration, Spain’s population would be well below 40 million instead of approaching 50 million.

For the sake of comparison, 318,000 babies were born in Spain in 2024, of which only 236,666 (74.4%) were born to mothers with Spanish nationality (including naturalised immigrants). By comparison, around 1.2 million babies are estimated to have been born in Iraq that same year—a country with a population similar to Spain’s.

The Iberian Exception

The composition of Spain’s immigrant population has shifted significantly over the past decades. While the share of migrants from Africa has remained relatively stable, those from Latin America and Asia have grown substantially, and Europeans now make up a smaller share than they did 25 years ago.

Today, immigrants from Central and South America account for a large portion of the foreign-born population, with sizable numbers also coming from Europe, Africa, and Asia. The single largest origin group in recent years has been Morocco, followed by Colombia, Romania, Venezuela, and Ecuador, among others.

The large and growing importance of Latin American immigration is something of a European exception and, for fairly obvious cultural reasons, may be one factor behind the—at least so far—relatively muted public response to mass immigration, particularly in electoral terms.

Spain’s version of the populist right is the Vox party, whose platform includes nativist, anti-immigration, and Islam-skeptic policies similar to those found in comparable parties across the continent. Yet while in the UK, Germany, or France the appeal of such parties now appears close to making them the strongest political forces—at least when consulting polling data—Vox remains firmly in third place, well behind the two large mainstream parties.

Another major influence is likely the country’s past. Among the legacies of the authoritarian conservative regime of Francisco Franco is a lingering stigma attached to right-wing politics, along with a certain left-leaning bias—perhaps an inverted counterpart to post-communist countries such as Poland.

Add to that Spain’s fractured sense of national identity—with strong separatist currents in regions like Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia making it harder for politicians to rally the public around anti-immigration narratives rooted in strong national sentiment—and you begin to see why, according to a 2021 study, “Spain has consistently maintained more open attitudes toward immigration than the European average, with less rejection and a greater appreciation of its contributions to society and the economy.”

This is also not the first time a Spanish government has embarked on a large-scale regularisation of illegal immigrants. Between 1986 and 2005, Spain implemented six such mass regularisation programs, granting legal status to roughly 1.2 million immigrants.

Such policies, however, have long been unpopular in other European countries, especially those in the continent’s wealthy northwest. Because of the Schengen area, these newly legalised migrants can then freely move to other Schengen states. This pressure led Spanish governments to change course.

Instead, in 2004 immigrants were granted extensive civic and social rights through registration in any of the country’s roughly 8,000 municipalities. Unlike many other countries, this process does not necessarily require a residence permit; an identity document and a utility bill with name and address may be sufficient, allowing unauthorised immigrants to register with relative ease. Once again, this represents a remarkably liberal immigration policy—and one upheld by both center-left and center-right governments.

For nearly 20 years, there were no additional large-scale immigrant amnesties. Until now.

Dirty Games

So what has changed? The answer lies in Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez’s extremely fragile parliamentary majority, which depends, among others, on the support of the Catalan pro-independence party Junts per Catalunya—a party that has long demanded the transfer of full immigration powers to the Catalan regional government.

Junts has recently all but withdrawn its support for the government, and without its crucial seven votes, the coalition lacks an effective parliamentary majority to pass legislation.

At the same time, the transfer of immigration powers to Catalonia had long been blocked by Podemos, a far-left party that is formally outside the government but can nevertheless exert pressure because of the latter’s fragility.

Podemos has also been pushing Sánchez to enact another mass regularisation bill. The solution to this Gordian knot lies in a simple trade-off: Podemos is publicly presented as the driving force behind the regularisation, securing support from its left-wing electoral base, while Junts obtains the transfer of immigration powers. A win-win scenario, right? Well—it depends on who you ask. For Pedro Sánchez, at least temporarily, sure. For Podemos and Junts, same. Spain itself, however, would find itself on much more shaky ground.

The regularisation was carried out not through standard parliamentary legislation, but by decree. The time frame for the technical evaluation of applicants is extremely short, running from early April to June 30, 2026. Sánchez repeatedly insists that having no criminal record is a prerequisite for eligibility. But, as always, the devil is in the details. If a country of origin fails to supply the relevant documentation in time, a sworn declaration by the applicant will suffice. Moreover, criminal records are considered only in cases of final convictions in Spain, effectively disregarding police or judicial records from other countries—and, to a considerable extent, even those within Spain itself.

Gift From God

Measures like this also effectively reward unauthorised immigration rather than discourage it, incentivizing others to follow the same path. While defenders of the measure understandably argue in economic terms—an aging population, shortages in the labour pool, the affordability of pensions—it remains an open question whether people selected on essentially a single criterion, i.e., that they managed to reach Spanish soil, are the right ones to build Spain’s future on.

People often say it is foolish to bring massive numbers of immigrants into an economy with a youth unemployment rate of over 15%—yet this is somewhat misleading, since migrants are in fact coming to do (or at least this is the intention of political and business elites) jobs that young Spaniards, on average, do not want to do themselves.

Pedro Sánchez explicitly said in an X post that the regularisation is aimed at people who “care for our parents and work in our fields,” effectively confirming that one of the biggest drivers of mass immigration is the maintenance of one of Europe’s most populous citizenry: battalions of elderly people who need their bums wiped and can no longer do it themselves. Who would do that work, if not third-world migrants, as Zach Polanski of the British Green Party recently claimed in an interview.

For all their professed love of immigrants and concern about their rights and well-being, it is clear where left-wing politicians place them in the social pecking order, not only in Spain but other Western nations as well.

But in the background lurks a more sinister truth: the Western left has long been aware that naturalised migrants are likely to vote for their parties, and are thus more than happy to help the process along. Now, it is important to note that the kind of regularisation currently planned by the government does not grant recipients the right to vote. But, it does open a pathway toward eventual naturalisation—and with it, voting rights.

Europe is full of examples of often ideologically incoherent electoral coalitions between predominantly Muslim minorities and the progressive left, for instance in France and the UK. Spanish left-wing parties, such as Podemos, would clearly like to benefit from this dynamic as well. Yet it is a dangerous game. Apart from the obvious damage to social cohesion in countries increasingly voting along ethnic lines, this strategy can also backfire.

Economically and politically, few groups are harmed by continuous waves of mass immigration as much as earlier, already integrated immigrants, whose wages in immigrant-heavy sectors are driven down by new arrivals. The 2024 U.S. presidential election showed that an anti-immigration candidate can achieve solid results even among voters of immigrant background, such as Trump managed to do with Hispanic Americans. So far, Europe’s populist right has mostly relied on openly nativist rhetoric, which likely pushed many people of immigrant origin toward far-left parties, even when their interests and ideologies did not fully align. This suggests there may be room for a significant realignment in the future, as earlier immigrants could start casting their vote for anti-immigration parties.

In the short term, support for Vox—which may already be the most popular choice among Spain’s youngest voters—is likely to rise as a result of this controversial move. “It’s like a gift from God,” said one of the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants in Spain when describing the regularisation. For him, that reaction is understandable. For Spain’s current regime, that gift may yet prove to be a rather poisonous one.