The extraordinary regularization of migrants in Spain reveals itself as one of the most comfortable political battles for the PSOE, despite the electoral profitability that anti-immigration measures have brought in numerous countries in recent times. The coalition government is defending this issue as a milestone in the legislature, aware that taking half a million people out of painful illegality, granting them rights, and placing them in decent labor and social conditions are elements that left-wing voters value in themselves. In addition, the Executive has shown favorable numbers for the economy, such as the increase in contributions that these people could bring to the more than 3.1 million foreigners registered in Social Security. Independent reports estimate that the net fiscal benefit for each regularized foreigner would be between 3,000 and 4,000 euros. Those same studies conclude that these processes do not generate a pull effect. Despite this, the Popular Party has chosen to draw its hardest discourse, close to the far-right theses that equate migration with crime.
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The leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, had very harsh words against the measure this Wednesday, insisting that foreigners are being regularized “in bulk” and bluntly stating that the Government is going to give papers to people like “an immigrant who has committed crimes, who has abused a woman or who has robbed a citizen.” These statements are in line with those he made in January, when the regularization was announced. Then Feijóo assured that the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, was making that decision to fatten his list of voters, words he later notably qualified. The text of the decree published in the BOE explicitly states that it will be necessary to prove the absence of criminal records in those countries where the foreigner has lived in the last five years. In addition, the Administration will automatically collect the criminal and police records both in Spain and in Europe of those interested in regularization. In any case, if there is any police incident, it will be reviewed “on a case-by-case and detailed basis,” states the legal text. It is about separating cases such as stealing a chicken out of hunger from, for example, an attempted rape.
It has not been enough for Feijóo, whose party supported in 2024 the popular legislative initiative that gathered more than 600,000 signatures to formalize the situation of foreigners. Nor has the position of the Church, both at its bases and in the hierarchy, unequivocally in favor of regularization, nor that of a good part of the business sector demanding legal labor, made him change his mind. It is a shaky ground for the conservative party and gives leverage to the Government, which has rushed out to declare the words of a person aspiring to be president of all Spaniards “unworthy.” “He is not sabotaging the Government, but thousands of citizens,” Migration Minister Elma Saiz reproached him. “They are people in an irregular situation, not criminals,” she replied to the Popular leader. To put the matter on the street level, the minister and government spokesperson recalled that those thousands of foreigners are the ones citizens know because they work with them, care for the elderly, and their children share school with all the other children. That is, those we greet at the bar every day. Even Vox’s electorate knows that some of the jobs those men and women perform are not wanted by Spaniards.
The issue of criminal records that the opposition brandishes comes a little late. In the first drafts of this decree that were known, regularization required laxer requirements: it was allowed, for example, that a responsible declaration by the interested party about the cleanliness of their criminal record would suffice if the criminal record could not be obtained in their countries of origin or others where they have lived. That assumption has disappeared from the final text. And up to two exceptions were opened in that same area: those who had been living in Spain for five years would not need to prove their criminal record, nor would those who had already requested it on some occasion during that time. Both exceptions have been eliminated from the decree, which has been hardened following requests from the Government itself presented by the Ministry of the Interior and later endorsed by the legal report of the Council of State. What the PP now suggests, gathering police files opened in other countries, would make any regularization of this kind practically impossible, neither the current one nor those presented by José María Aznar in his day. A total of 1.3 million foreigners have obtained their residence permit through extraordinary means since the eighties.
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Feijóo’s words have not only been harshly attacked by the coalition government but also find no echo in important sectors of society that have valued this measure as humane and convenient.
Perhaps unexpectedly, Sánchez has found in the regularization that is already starting in offices throughout Spain, another measure to fuel that counterplay, especially in the field of international politics. To his open opposition to the war in Iran, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or any conflict opened by Israel, even to the rejection of a greater budgetary contribution to NATO, this measure supporting foreign workers is now added, so opposed to the theses of the right and far-right inspired by a leader like Donald Trump. The President of the United States resorted precisely to the discourse linking immigration and crime to justify his policy of expulsions and the action of the immigration police, ICE, harshly questioned for the brutality of its methods.
The PSOE has been repeating its grandiloquent phrase placing Sánchez “on the right side of history” and does so both in international politics and domestically with the extraordinary regularization of migrants. It remains to be seen whether such harsh words as those Feijóo has dedicated to foreigners will help him in his race to La Moncloa or if they will have a boomerang effect.
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