{"id":37807,"date":"2026-08-04T13:13:41","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T13:13:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/37807\/"},"modified":"2026-08-04T13:13:41","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T13:13:41","slug":"italy-and-germanys-censure-of-spains-migrant-amnesty-is-hypocritical-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/37807\/","title":{"rendered":"Italy and Germany\u2019s censure of Spain\u2019s migrant amnesty is \u2018hypocritical\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Italy<\/a>, Germany <\/a>and other countries that accused Spain <\/a>of attracting migrants with its amnesty scheme have also quietly legalised the status of people who arrived irregularly in their own territory.<\/p>\n

Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni <\/a>has been among Spain\u2019s fiercest critics, calling for it to be excluded from the Schengen free-movement zone after 60,000 people entered the Spanish exclave of Ceuta<\/a> \u2013 even though most were pushed back into Morocco within 48 hours.<\/p>\n

Meloni and 21 other EU leaders, in a letter last week, argued for action against \u201cpull factors, such as the regularisation of [a] very large number of irregular migrants\u201d.<\/p>\n

That was a reference to Spanish prime minister Pedro S\u00e1nchez\u2019s recent amnesty for irregular migrants. The government had expected about 500,000 people to apply, but 1.2 million did so.<\/p>\n

But Meloni is set to grant work permits to a similar number of people by 2028 under a rolling programme to hire foreign workers and plug gaps in the labour market.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Italian government\u2019s position is certainly hypocritical because we\u2019re doing the same thing \u2013 albeit in a slightly different way,\u201d said Matteo Villa, a researcher at the Institute for International Political Studies.<\/p>\n

The Italian programme allows employers to apply for work permits for people from countries including Morocco, Egypt and Tunisia. In practice, experts say, it is often applied to people who are already residing in Italy irregularly. According to Villa, it\u2019s a \u201cdisguised amnesty\u201d. <\/p>\n

However, Alberto Guariso, a lawyer from Italy\u2019s Association for Legal Studies on Immigration, said the practice was declining because it was seen as too risky where irregular migrants must leave and then apply to re-enter the country.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0The Irish Times view on Ceuta: a time for calm diplomacy, not blusterOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Between 2022 when Meloni came to power and 2025, Italy had issued 590,700 work permits to immigrants through the so-called Flow Decree, according to the Italian interior ministry. In 2024, the government more than doubled the yearly quota compared with 2021, as it was regularly oversubscribed by companies.<\/p>\n

Between this year and 2028, another 497,550 permits are set to be issued for workers, bringing the total to almost 1.1 million under Meloni\u2019s watch.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Meloni government essentially took an approach very similar to what S\u00e1nchez is doing now … S\u00e1nchez adds an ethical component, saying they are doing this because it is the right thing to do. Meloni says they are doing this because it is necessary,\u201d Villa said.<\/p>\n

Germany and Greece, which also signed the letter, recently implemented amnesties at a smaller scale than in Spain, in addition to the normal residency programmes that most EU countries have.<\/p>\n

Between 2022 and 2025, Germany launched a policy for people who had so-called tolerated status \u2013 those who are temporarily not deported even though they do not have a right to stay \u2013 offering them a more stable permit for 18 months. Some 90,800 people have received this permit, according to data from the Federal Office for Migration.<\/p>\n

Greece, which was on the frontline of mass arrivals of Syrian refugees in 2015 and 2016, opened applications for undocumented migrants to regularise their status under certain conditions in 2024.<\/p>\n

It approved roughly 25,000 applications, according to official statistics, much lower than the up to 300,000 people initially targeted. The programme was first announced in 2023 to plug gaps in the agricultural, tourism and construction sectors but met an intense anti-immigration backlash.<\/p>\n

Among the handful of countries that did not sign the joint letter criticising Spain were Portugal, which granted legal status to 473,000 people in recent years, and Ireland, the current holder of the rotating EU presidency.<\/p>\n

Spain has carried out six previous immigrant amnesties in the past 40 years, including two under conservative governments. Under the last one in 2005, nearly 600,000 people were regularised.<\/p>\n

While EU governments can regularise the status of migrants on their territory, the European Commission said they \u201cneed to ensure that these decisions do not affect the correct application of the EU migration and asylum system\u201d. The bloc\u2019s justice ministers are due to hold an emergency video call on Tuesday in response to the Ceuta incident.<\/p>\n

\u201cRegularisation is a bit of a taboo for many member states … people don\u2019t like to talk about it, but actually lots of member states have done regularisations,\u201d said Laetitia Van der Vennet, of the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (Picum).<\/p>\n

Van der Vennet said amnesties benefited not only migrants but also the societies and institutions of the countries where they lived. People could work without fear of deportation while governments collected more tax.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that Spain is doing it and doing it proudly is one of the reasons why they\u2019re being criticised for it,\u201d she said, adding that the size of Spain\u2019s programme could be another factor.<\/p>\n

\u2013 Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Italy, Germany and other countries that accused Spain of attracting migrants with its amnesty scheme have also quietly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":37808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[646,24701,25206,25207,25208,1131,241,1214,5,1998,21715,1864,356,148,451],"class_list":["post-37807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-italy","tag-africa","tag-ceuta","tag-deportations","tag-despair","tag-economic-future","tag-economy","tag-europe","tag-immigration","tag-italy","tag-migrants","tag-money","tag-morocco","tag-politics","tag-spain","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}