The extraordinary regularization of migrants in Spain is revealed to be one of the most comfortable political battles for the PSOE, despite the electoral profitability that anti-immigration measures have reported in numerous countries in recent times. The coalition government is defending this issue as a milestone in the legislature, aware that bringing half a million people out of painful hiding, granting them rights and placing them in decent working and social conditions are elements that left-wing voters value for themselves. In addition, the Executive has shown numbers favorable to the economy, such as the increase in contributions that these people could contribute to the more than 3.1 million foreigners registered with Social Security. Independent reports estimate that the net tax benefit for each regularized foreigner would be between 3,000 and 4,000 euros. These same studies conclude that these processes do not generate a call effect. Despite this, the Popular Party has chosen to unleash its harshest discourse, close to the theses of the extreme right that equate emigration with crime.
The leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, had very strong words against the measure this Wednesday, insisting that foreigners are being regularized “in bulk” and stating unequivocally that the Government is going to give papers to people like “an immigrant who has committed a crime, who has abused a woman or who has robbed a citizen.” These statements are in line with those made in January, when the regularization was announced. Then Feijóo assured that the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, made that decision to fatten his list of voters, words that he ended up clarifying significantly. The text of the decree already published in the BOE explains that it will be necessary to demonstrate the absence of criminal records in those countries in which the foreigner has lived for the last five years. In addition, the Administration will automatically collect the criminal and police history 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 basis,” states the legal text. It is about separating cases such as the theft of a chicken due to hunger from, for example, an attempted rape.
It has not been enough for Feijóo, whose party supported the popular legislative initiative in 2024 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 community that demands legal labor, changed his mind. It is a shaky ground for the conservative party and gives strength to the Government, which has come out in a rush to declare “unworthy” the words of a person who aspires to be president of all Spaniards. “He is not boycotting the Government, but thousands of citizens,” the Minister of Migration, Elma Saiz, reproached him. “They are irregular people, not criminals,” he replied to the popular. To put the matter at street level, the minister and Government spokesperson recalled that those thousands of foreigners are the ones that citizens know, because they work with them, they take care of the elderly and their children share school with everyone’s children. That is, those we greet at the bar every day. Even the Vox electorate knows that some of the jobs that these men and women perform are not wanted by Spaniards.
The accusation of criminal records put forward by the opposition comes a little late. In the first known drafts of this decree, regularization required more lax requirements: it was allowed, for example, that a responsible declaration by the interested party regarding the cleanliness of their criminal record would be sufficient if the criminal record had not been able to be obtained in their countries of origin or other countries in which they had lived. That assumption has disappeared from the final text. And there were even two exceptions 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 at that time. Both exceptions have been eliminated from the decree, which has been toughened following requests from the Government itself presented by the Ministry of the Interior and subsequently 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 these characteristics impossible in practice, neither the current one nor those presented by José María Aznar at the time. A total of 1.3 million foreigners have obtained their residence permit through extraordinary means since the 1980s.
Feijóo’s words have not only been harshly attacked by the coalition government, but they have also failed to find an 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 beginning in offices throughout Spain, one more measure to support this counter game, especially in the field of international politics. To his open opposition to the war in Iran, to the Russian invasion of Ukraine or to any conflict opened by Israel, even to the rejection of a greater budgetary contribution to NATO, is now added this measure of support for foreign workers, so opposed to the theses of the right and the extreme right inspired by a leader like Donald Trump. The president of the United States resorted precisely to the speech that links immigration and crime to justify his policy of expulsions and the actions of the immigration police, ICE, harshly questioned for the brutality of its methods.
The PSOE has been repeating its grandiloquent phrase that places Sánchez “on the right side of history” and does so both in international politics and in the domestic sphere with the extraordinary regularization of migrants. It remains to be seen if words as harsh as those that Feijóo has dedicated to foreigners will help him in his career towards La Moncloa or if they will have a boomerang effect.
