Samantha Mythen
MORE than 400,000 undocumented workers could soon have full legal rights to live and work in Spain.
It’s been a drawn-out process, with political negotiations on the petition to give half a million illegal immigrants legal status in Spain starting in April last year. The petition promoted by the country’s Catholic Bishops in 2023, collected more than 600,000 signatures and was supported by 900 different organisations.
The resulting draft legislation would allow undocumented migrants who were already living in Spain before November 1, 2021, to be given residency.
“What should we do, expel them all or regularise their situation?,” Valladolid archbishop Luis Argüello, a supporter of the petition said.
READ MORE: Spain will give work permits and residency to thousands of illegal migrants
As Spain’s immigration regulations were going through reform last year, the petition stalled, with Sánchez’s government arguing those changes would capture the undocumented workers.
“We Spaniards are children of migration, we will not be parents of xenophobia,” President Pedro Sánchez said.
Those new regulations, which streamline visa applications, come into effect on Tuesday, May 20. However, Ombudsman Angel Gabilondo warned Parliament, the regulations could create a legal loophole, seeing thousands of asylum seekers losing their work permits and leaving them without legal status if their asylum claims are denied.
Several socialist ministers from the PSOE party have since brought the petition’s extraordinary regularisation debate back into Congress today, several government and parliamentary sources told EL PAÍS.
It’s argued the drafting of the petition into law could capture those left out of the new immigration regulations.
Spain has previously legalised undocumented migrants through the extraordinary legal process. More than 22,000 migrants were regulated by the Government in the months following the devastating Valencia floods on October 29.
Many undocumented migrants work low-paid but essential jobs in Spain’s underground economy, from fruit picking, to looking after the sick and elderly in care homes, or as delivery drivers.
These jobs, often passed up by Spanish people, are essential to the functioning of Spain’s economy, but without legal protections, the workers are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.
Last year, an unprecedented number of people applied for asylum in Spain – more than 167,000 – making it the second country in the European Union receiving the most asylum requests, behind Germany.
Most asylum seeker applicants are from Venezuela, followed by Colombia and Mali.
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