‘It’s like a gift from God’: undocumented foreign workers welcome Spanish amnesty

Half a million migrants will be ‘regularised’ under plans to boost economic growth that have angered rightwing parties

Not everyone has been enthused by the Spanish government’s decision this week to buck European political trends by announcing plans to regularise 500,000 undocumented migrants and asylum seekers to boost “economic growth and social cohesion”.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the conservative People’s party (PP), described the move as a reward for “illegality” that would bring more people into the country and “overwhelm our public services”.

Santiago Abascal, who leads the far-right Vox party, attacked the measure as a nefarious effort to facilitate an “invasion” designed to replace Spaniards with foreigners.

But for the young Bangladeshi man sitting in a cramped NGO office in central Madrid on a rainy Thursday, the announcement was nothing short of a miracle. For him, the decree raises the prospect of a future that need not be spent pounding the streets and selling cheap umbrellas in all weather to earn between €200 (£173) and €400 a month.

“I don’t have my papers so I can’t get a proper job,” said the man, who came to Spain 14 months ago and asked not to be named.

“I really worry about paying my rent and I’m also trying to support my wife and daughter, who I left behind. I can’t get public housing or go to the doctor. I’m out on the street all day in the rain and the cold and the sun, just trying to earn a living.”

That, he added, was why he had been so delighted by Tuesday’s announcement.

“I’m so excited,” he said. “It’s like a gift from God that will help keep me going.”

Sitting next to him, Mohammed Elahi Alam Alam, the president of the Valiente Bangla Association, which works to help undocumented migrants, also welcomed the decision by the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE), saying it was long overdue recognition of reality.

It was also a necessary counter to Vox’s stated intention of deporting 8 million people of foreign origin, including their Spanish-born children.

“There are people who don’t want immigrants here – the fascists – but who’s going to work in the fields?” Alam asked. “Immigrants. Who’s going to work in the restaurants? Immigrants. Who’s going to look after people’s families? Immigrants.”

Evidence of Valiente Bangla’s multi-faceted outreach work crammed Alam’s office: sacks of potatoes for communal, charitable meals; megaphones; children’s toys; and a stack of Spanish language books.

Many of those eligible for regularisation, however, will not need to work on their Spanish. Rosa (not her real name), who came to Spain from her home country of Colombia almost two years ago, is one of the huge number of Latin American women who work informally as cleaners, cooks and carers. Many are badly paid and some are mistreated by their employers.

Rosa said: “A lot of us have sacrificed so much to come here in search of a better life and yet some days you get up and think: ‘I just can’t do this any longer – I’m going to go back.’

“Some people deliberately hire undocumented people because they know they won’t need to pay them what they should or cover their social security.”

For Rosa, the regularisation programme is the chance to get a job that pays more than €120 a week, and to access the protections and benefits enjoyed by legal workers.

Despite the shrill political opposition to regularisation, it is far from unprecedented in Spain; PP and socialist governments enacted similar programmes between 1986 and 2005. Research suggests such initiatives can yield economic benefits for newly legalised workers and for government coffers.

Joan Monràs, one of the authors of a study into the 2005 regularisation of almost 600,000 non-EU immigrants, said tax revenues increased by about €4,000 per regularised immigrant a year, adding that the policy had not led to “magnet effects” in encouraging further arrivals.

“The first part of the paper looked at whether there was a ‘pull effect’ or not and we concluded that there wasn’t … there was no relative change in the flow of migrants,” said the labour economist.

“Something else we saw very clearly was that the career paths of immigrants who entered the social security system improved significantly. A good example of this was domestic workers who entered the labour market. After starting off working for families, within six months, they’d started working for larger companies and earning higher salaries.”

The decree is also not the first time the administration of Pedro Sánchez has defended the moral and economic case for immigration as Spain struggles with an ageing population and low birthrate.

He said in October 2024: “Throughout history, migration has been one of the great drivers of the development of nations while hatred and xenophobia have been – and continue to be – the greatest destroyer of nations. The key is in managing it well.”

But his government’s words and policies have infuriated the far right in Spain and beyond, and fake news stories about the regularisation have proliferated on social media. Although the measure will confer official resident status on successful applicants, it will not give them citizenship and the accompanying right to vote in general elections.

On X this week, Elon Musk reposted a claim that Sánchez was using the move to conduct “electoral engineering” adding: “Wow.”

Sánchez reposted the SpaceX tycoon’s comment with a reply of his own: “Mars can wait. Humanity can’t.”

Amid the squabbling and point-scoring, some of those who have spent years campaigning for regularisation have called for reflection about what the decree means and why it is needed.

Catholic groups, including the migration department of the Spanish conference of bishops, see the measure as “an act of social justice and recognition of so many migrants who, through their work, have long contributed to the development of our country, even at the cost of keeping them in an irregular situation”.

Edith Espínola, a spokesperson for the Regularisation Now! movement, said the decree would go a long way to restoring the rights that so many people had lost when they crossed borders in search of safety or a better life.

“Regularisation makes you feel like a citizen and a person,” she said. “It stops you feeling like an object and it lets you fight for your rights. You know those rights are yours but they’re never really yours until you have a plastic card that says you’re a resident of this country.”

Regularisation, she added, allowed people to work, study and live with dignity. “It means that you can break through that invisible border. It means you can feel a little bit more human from the moment that you have that plastic card.”