This month, Spain is set to launch a mass regularization program for migrants that could give legal status to hundreds of thousands of undocumented people living in the country. The scheme could become one of the most ambitious ever implemented in Europe. It puts Madrid at odds with much of the continent, which is instead tightening immigration rules.

Spain has one of the largest migrant populations in Europe as a share of the total, with roughly 10 million foreign-born residents out of around 50 million inhabitants. Some of the largest documented communities come from Colombia, Morocco, and Venezuela. Although irregular arrivals from Africa have significantly dropped since their 2018 peak, think tank Funcas estimates that the number of undocumented people living in Spain is on the rise, approaching 840,000 last year, with the largest groups being from Colombia, Honduras, and Peru.

The Spanish government is hammering out details of the plan and could present the final version as early as this week, El País reported. According to the latest draft of the policy, undocumented migrants will have until the end of June to apply for a one-year residence and work permit. The one-off program targets both economic migrants and asylum-seekers with pending requests. To be eligible, applicants must have no criminal records and be able to prove that they have been in Spain for at least five months.

The government expects to receive some 750,000 requests and says that about 500,000 people will meet the eligibility criteria. A leaked report from the Spanish police’s National Center for Immigration and Borders suggests that as many as 1.1 million people could apply. Spanish Immigration Minister Elma Saiz said the scheme aims to make it easier for newly regularized migrants to obtain longer-term visas via existing pathways, such as employer sponsorship.

“The regularization that’s been achieved is a historic milestone for Spain and for the world in the times we live in, because it was driven by migrants themselves,” said Silvana Cabrera, a spokesperson for Regularización Ya, a grassroots movement that has long campaigned for the scheme. Cabrera is a naturalized Spanish citizen from Bolivia.

Starting in 2021, Regularización Ya played a key role in a citizen initiative demanding a sweeping regularization, which gathered over 600,000 signatures. Legislators overwhelmingly voted to include the bill in Spain’s parliamentary agenda in 2024, but progress has been sluggish since, as Socialist Workers’ Party Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez lacks an absolute majority in Congress. In January, Sánchez’s government decided to press ahead with an executive decree.

Foreigners, both registered and undocumented, play a major role in Spain’s economy, particularly in sectors such as agriculture, hospitality, and elder care. They are credited with giving a boost to the country’s GDP, which has grown faster than in any other large European country in recent years; unemployment, meanwhile, is at its lowest level since 2008.

However, those without legal status are unable to seek medical care, send their children to school, open a bank account, and get regular work contracts, which often leads to exploitation, according to Cabrera. “Living without papers is like being in an invisible prison,” she said.

The government sells the regularization scheme as a commonsense measure to confront this reality. Supporters present the move as both morally and economically sound.

“At the end of the day, such an important step is no symbolic matter, it is about social justice, rights and democracy,” said Estrella Galán, a Spanish member of the European Parliament with Sumar, a left-wing coalition partner of Sánchez’s Socialists. “But it’s also important to highlight that all those who will be regularized, most of whom are already working but cannot pay into the social security system,” she said, “now they will.”

Spain’s main business employers’ organization voiced some reservations about the regularization being introduced by decree. Yet it has conveyed support for the scheme itself. Spanish business organizations rely heavily on migrant workforces.

Not everyone is a fan of the regularization, though. In March, a narrow majority of legislators, including the conservative People’s Party, the far right, and some regionalist parties, backed a nonbinding text urging the government to scupper the project. Critics worry that the scheme isn’t strict enough in verifying whether applicants have had troubles with the law, particularly in their countries of origin. They also argue that the government is not earmarking enough resources to the already overburdened bureaucracy that will have to run background checks and process regularization requests.

“Spain is an open and welcoming country, but it makes no sense to regularize hundreds of thousands of people without knowing if they’re working or, on the contrary, stealing wallets on the Madrid metro or mobile phones on Barcelona’s Rambla,” said Cuca Gamarra, a member of the Spanish Congress with the People’s Party. “It’s not about not regularizing at all, but about doing so with oversight, verification, and a stronger justice and administrative system,” she added, while also warning about a “pull effect that might be harmful to the entire European Union.”

The government is reportedly tightening the rules regarding the documents that applicants will need to provide to show that they have no criminal records, heeding recommendations made in recent days by the State Council, an advisory body.

Spain’s scheme is at odds with the prevailing approach to migration in most of Europe—let alone in the United States under President Donald Trump. With immigration control consistently ranking as one of European voters’ top priorities, the European Union has grown increasingly tough on the issue in recent years.

In January, the European Commission balked at the freshly announced Spanish program, urging Madrid to consider “potential migratory and security implications” for the bloc and stressing that the EU remained focused on “reducing irregular migration.”

In recent months, the EU has moved to make it easier for member states to reject and deport asylum-seekers, including to places different from their countries of origin. The idea of establishing return hubs outside the bloc is gaining momentum among leaders. It was spearheaded by far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who in 2024 constructed two such centers in Albania for the migrants arriving in Italy. The Netherlands signed an agreement with Uganda last fall, and the European Parliament in March backed the policy for the bloc as a whole, largely with the votes of the conservatives and the far right.

It’s not only right-wing politicians who have taken such approaches. The broad coalition governments of Austria and Germany are also aiming to deport asylum-seekers to third countries, just as are Denmark’s Social Democrats, who under Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen have taken one of the harshest stances on immigration in Europe.

Alongside their anti-migrant rhetoric, however, some European countries have also quietly spearheaded regularization programs not too different from Spain’s.

Between 2022 and 2025, Germany opened a window to give legal status to up to 137,000 people who couldn’t be deported for administrative or humanitarian reasons. Italy initiated a major regularization scheme in 2020 that received 220,000 requests, although complex eligibility criteria and administrative inefficiencies have slowed the process. Many applications are still pending.

After taking power in 2022, Meloni also launched sweeping de facto regularizations by setting quotas of foreigners needed in the Italian job market, with a whopping 450,000 places for the 2023-2025 period and almost 500,000 for the three following years. (In these cases, too, the Italian administration has only managed to process a small fraction of applications so far.)

While these so-called flow decrees are, in theory, supposed to precede migrant arrivals, they are mainly used to regularize undocumented foreigners already in the country, said Matteo Villa, a senior researcher at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies.

Yet the Spanish program stands out for its scope and relatively loose criteria. “Five months of required stay in Spain is shorter than what we have been seeing in other countries,” said Laetitia Van der Vennet, a senior advocacy officer at the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants, a Brussels-based nongovernmental organization.

Another difference is how loud the Spanish government is being about its program. Meloni has barely uttered a peep about the hundreds of thousands of foreigners that Italy aims to regularize on her watch; Sánchez, on the contrary, penned a guest essay in the New York Times and has given interviews to international media touting his approach on migrants.

“This measure has a clear geopolitical dimension to it,” said Nando Sigona, a professor of international migration at the University of Birmingham. According to Sigona, Sánchez is trying to regain control of the narrative around migrants at home while presenting himself as a pillar of the international left and a defender of European liberal values in the face of the right-wing turn underway in much of the West.

Judging by the splash that the scheme has made so far, he seems to be succeeding. One U.K.-based commentator labeled Sánchez “Europe’s left-wing icon.” At home and abroad, the Spanish government has effectively countered the right-wing narrative that migration is chiefly an issue of security and public order.

“The regularization will leave a precedent—one in which migration has been looked at from the standpoint of rights,” Cabrera said.