While the US government is waging an unprecedented deportation campaign against immigrants, combating irregular migration is one of the European Union’s priorities. Amidst the global rhetoric against undocumented immigrants, Spain stands out as an exception.
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The Spanish government wants to regularise more than one million migrants within three years.
For Madrid, this is one of the keys to future prosperity, in a context of demographic decline.
By 2027, more than one million undocumented immigrants could be granted legal status in Spain.
A government reform, which came into effect in May 2025, plans to legalise 300,000 people per year for three years.
In parallel, a draft bill, yet to be debated in Parliament, aims to regularise 470,000 undocumented immigrants who arrived before the end of December 2024.
The main objective is to support economic growth and the country’s pension system.
Migrants account for 13.5% of the Spanish workforce, and 40% of new jobs in 2024, particularly in construction, agriculture and healthcare.
Madrid’s new policy aims to address the labour shortage and the aging population.
This is a reality affecting the entire European Union, where the working-age population is declining by one million people per year.
Foreign workers filled two-thirds of new jobs between 2019 and 2023.
It is estimated that the EU has between 2.6 and 3.2 million undocumented migrants.
Among them is 31-year-old Lorena Flechas, who came to Spain from Colombia last March, with her husband and their small daughter Sol.
“In my country, right now, there is a lot of war, bombings and kidnappings.
So, I told myself: ‘No, I can’t. I can’t leave my daughter and my family in this situation,’” explains Lorena.
“My first option was the American dream, the United States. But I couldn’t get a visa. I also thought about crossing the border, but I didn’t want to put my daughter’s life at risk.”
Since visas are not required for most Latin American citizens to enter the European Union, aside from Bolivians and Ecuadorians, Lorena and her husband headed for Spain, where Lorena’s family is already living.
The couple has started the process to obtain residence permits and the right to work in Spain.
“My daughter is still very young and she still has the opportunity to receive a good education and to thrive. And the baby I’m expecting also deserves to grow up in the best conditions,” says Lorena, who dreams of one day being able to buy her own home in Spain.
In the meantime, the family lives on odd jobs her husband finds and with the help of the association AESCO, which supports immigrants both materially and in their efforts to regularise their status.
The majority of AESCO’s beneficiaries come from Latin America.
“Currently, it takes two to seven years for people to get all the legal documents allowing them to be fully integrated,” says Andrés Gaviria, President of AESCO. “The new reform would speed up the process considerably. This is necessary to allow a very large number of people to move out of the informal economy. And it is estimated that five to six out of ten people from Latin America arrive with a degree. This constitutes a source of labour for sectors where the European labour market faces significant shortages.”
Claudia Finotelli, a sociologist and professor at Complutense University in Madrid, says immigration is now central to Spain’s labour market and demographic future. “Between 2022 and 2024, 5.2 million jobs were created; 75% of them are held by people with dual nationality or by foreigners,” she explains.
Spain’s 2005 previous regularisation programme alone brought €4,000 in social security revenue per migrant, while more than one million people have gained legal status since 2009, under an individual regularisation scheme.
While the Spanish model is in stark contrast to the European strategy, which focuses on deportation, “similar measures have been taken in various EU countries,” observes Finotelli, such as in Portugal, Italy and Germany.
“The European Central Bank clearly stated in a report published last May that the European Union is experiencing a labour shortage.
In Europe, 50% of the jobs created in recent years were created thanks to the contribution of migrants. It’s an essential driver of the labour market and economic growth, at a time when the population is declining, and baby boomers are 15 years away from retirement,” concludes Finotelli.