Spain legalizes up to 500,000 undocumented migrants, drawing backlash

As the United States experiences negative net migration due to President Donald Trump policies, Spain is heading in the opposite direction, announcing plans to grant legal status for up to half a million illegal migrants.

Spain’s Socialist-led government approved a royal decree on Tuesday, allowing unauthorized immigrants who entered the country before the end of 2025, and have lived there for at least five months and have no criminal record to obtain one-year residency and work permits, with possible pathways to citizenship.

While many European governments have moved to tighten immigration policies — some encouraged by the Trump administration’s hardline approach — Spain has taken a different path. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his ministers have repeatedly highlighted what they describe as the economic benefits of legal migration, particularly for the country’s aging workforce.

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Spain “will not look the other way,” Migration Minister Elma Saiz told reporters at a press conference, saying the government is “dignifying and recognizing people who are already in our country.”

The plan has sparked a fierce political battle, as conservatives and the populist Vox party have condemned what they describe as an amnesty that could fuel irregular migration.

Vox leader Santiago Abascal wrote on social media that the measure “harms all Spaniards,” arguing critics of his party are motivated by fear of Vox’s growing influence. “They are not worried about the consequences of Sánchez’s criminal policies,” Abascal wrote. “They are worried that Vox will gain more strength.”

Alan Mendoza, executive director of the Henry Jackson Society, told Fox News Digital that “Spain’s decision appears calculated to increase the lure of Europe as a destination for illegal migrants in general, causing problems for all of its neighbors. If Spain wishes to become a repository for such people, then I’m sure other European countries would appreciate signing agreements to transfer their own illegal migrants there. Absent this, we will all be paying the price for Spanish largesse.”

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A migrant walks by a makeshift settlement where migrants evicted from a former high school last week are camping outdoors in the middle of winter in Badalona, Spain, Dec. 26, 2025.  (Bruna Casas/Reuters)

Ricard Zapata-Barrero, a political science professor at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, told Fox News Digital that “This is not a symbolic gesture, It is a direct challenge to the dominant European approach, which treats irregular migration primarily as a policing issue. Spain, instead, frames it as a governance problem — one that requires institutional capacity, legal pathways and administrative realism rather than more detention centers and externalized borders.”

Migrants in Madrid, Spain, on April 9, 2024.  (Francesco Militello Mirto/Nur Photo via Getty Images))

He said Spain’s immigration system had been showing signs of strain for years.

“When hundreds of thousands of people live in irregularity for years, the issue stops being an individual failure and becomes a structural one,” Zapata-Barrero said. “In this context, regularization is not leniency — it is governability.”

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Migrants wait to disembark at the port of Arguineguin after being rescued by a Spanish Coast Guard vessel, on the island of Gran Canaria, Spain, Nov. 14, 2025. (Borja Suarez / Reuters)

He argued, “In a Europe closing in on itself, Spain has taken a step that sets it apart — not because it is ‘softer,’ but because it is more pragmatic,” he added. “Whether this becomes a model or a counter-model inside the EU remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: Spain has launched a political experiment that Europe will watch closely.”

Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report.