Ricardo left Bolivia, his wife and daughter behind three years ago in the hope of finding better opportunities in Spain. But, as an undocumented migrant, the 50-year-old former graphic designer has been unable to secure regular employment and life has been tough for him in Madrid.
His only income comes from looking after an elderly man at weekends, while during the week he does volunteer work at a centre for immigrants in the south of the city. Until recently, the soaring cost of housing meant he had to share a room with another migrant before finding an affordable flat share.
“It’s very, very difficult,” he says. “It makes you sad, leaving your family behind, the ones you love. The loneliness is bad. But you have to be able to overcome all that, to motivate yourself.”
In late January, the Spanish government announced a mass legalisation scheme, suddenly making the future look much brighter for Ricardo and other undocumented foreigners. The measure will provide migrants with a one-year, renewable residency permit, allowing them to be hired legally. The government estimates it will benefit about half a million people.
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“Having residency for a year means you have a good chance of getting a labour contract and therefore staying in Spain [legally] for longer,” says Ricardo. “It’s an enormous opportunity for a lot of people.”
The plan has created a stir in Spain’s political arena and underlines the country’s status as an outlier in Europe on the immigration issue.
“Some say we’ve gone too far, that we are going against the current, but I would like to ask you: when did recognising rights become something radical?” the Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, asked shortly after unveiling the initiative. “Spain is above all a welcoming country and this is the path we choose: dignity, community and justice.”
The legalisation process will be open to foreigners who can prove they have spent five months in Spain and who have a clean criminal record. Asylum seekers will also be able to apply. The registration process will run from April until the end of June.
Most of the country’s undocumented migrants are believed to be Latin American, with Colombia, Peru and Honduras providing the largest numbers.
The Sánchez government’s relatively welcoming policy contrasts with the clampdown on immigration most of Spain’s neighbours have been implementing in recent years.
France and Germany have tightened requisites for new arrivals to remain and gain residency, while Italy’s radical right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has made a tough line on immigration one of her banner policies, even signing off recently on the use of naval vessels to block migrant arrivals (although the country is issuing work visas to thousands of non-EU nationals to address labour shortages).
Ireland, meanwhile, has tightened rules for gaining asylum, family reunification and citizenship.
The government’s legalisation policy is a way of taking the initiative on an issue which is a worry for many Spaniards. “Concerns about immigration in Spain have increased recently,” says Paco Camas, head of public opinion in Spain for polling firm Ipsos.
“This issue is comfortable for the right and uncomfortable for the left,” he adds. “The left is being forced to take a position on this, to say something about immigration, because it’s no longer just something that the far-right talks about, it’s something that worries people.”
The regularisation programme, Camas says, means the Spanish government can point to a clear, concrete policy on immigration.
Sánchez’s stance on immigration is perhaps less surprising when taking into account the fact he is the only left-wing leader of a major EU country. On the international stage he has underlined his status as a bold progressive on a number of issues. He has been Europe’s most outspoken critic of Israel’s actions in Gaza and has defied US president Donald Trump’s demand for Nato members to raise their defence spending to five per cent of GDP.
More recently, he has vowed to clamp down on social media companies, calling on state prosecutors to investigate the likes of X, TikTok and Meta for possible crimes linked to child pornography.
The immigration amnesty, Camas says, allows Sánchez “to position himself in the vanguard of resistance to the right-wing reactionary wave that we’re seeing, not just across Europe, but across the West.”
Irene Montero, of the far-left Podemos party, whose support for the regularisation scheme helped secure its implementation, presented Spain in direct contrast to the United States on this issue.
“Providing rights is the answer to racism,” she said. “While they kidnap children, they kill [and] they terrorise people, we give them papers.”
However, the Spanish government also has economic reasons for legalising the status of migrants.
Since Covid, Spain’s economy has been growing faster than almost all of its neighbours. GDP is estimated to have grown by close to 3 per cent in 2025, while unemployment, a long-standing weakness for Spain, recently dropped below 10 per cent for the first time since 2008. The left-wing coalition government says that immigrants have played a crucial role in driving that economic performance.
“The West needs people,” Sánchez wrote in a recent op-ed piece in The New York Times. “Unless they embrace migration, [western countries] will experience a sharp demographic decline that will prevent them from keeping their economies and public services afloat.”
Funcas, a conservative think-tank, found that nearly half of economic growth since 2022 was due to migrant workers. A 2024 report by Spain’s central bank stated that the country will need about 25 million migrant arrivals over the next three decades in order to sustain growth and the social security system.
Yet the economic arguments have not won over the political opposition.
The leader of the far-right Vox party, Santiago Abascal, said the regularisation scheme was part of an “invasion that ruins and kills and we’ve already heard about the true intention: replace the Spaniards that [the government] don’t like and who don’t vote for them”.
Until recently, the conservative People’s Party (PP) had voiced support for a major migrant legalisation plan and in government, it implemented its own initiatives, formalising the status of just over half a million migrants between 2000 and 2001. However, having lurched to the right on the immigration issue in the last few months, under pressure from Vox, the party’s leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has declared that this current plan would “increase the ‘draw’ effect and overwhelm our public services”. Under this government, he said, “illegality is rewarded”.
Some commentators have also warned that the true number of those who seek to benefit from the scheme will be far greater than the projected 500,000. Funcas reports that 837,938 undocumented foreigners were in the country last year, an eight-fold increase on 2017. According to a report leaked to media by the police’s national centre for immigration and borders, the total number who seek residency could turn out to be between 750,000 and 1.1 million.
Such concerns will not prevent the measure, which does not require parliamentary approval, from coming into effect. The government has promised to make the process swift for those who apply.
Ricardo, who is looking forward to making his application and working full time as a carer, says he believes Spain’s businesses will be the biggest beneficiaries, with a large, regulated workforce becoming available.
“Immigration is regulated by the jobs market,” he says. “People who can’t get a job go home; supply and demand will dictate the number of people who stay here.”
