MADRID – Almost a decade since the Brexit vote meant Britain pulled up the drawbridge against migration, Spain has chosen to go the other way with a scheme to regularise at least half a million migrants.
Spain’s government has championed the economic and social benefits of migration with a regularisation scheme that began this month.
The amnesty scheme, which runs until the end of June, will offer a one-year legal renewable residence permit to undocumented migrants who are living in the country illegally and who can prove they arrived in the country before 31 December. They must also show they have no criminal record in their country of origin.
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The Socialist-led government says that the regularisation of so many migrants will bring them out of the “black economy” so that they pay taxes and social security.
The move has proved divisive, however. The conservative opposition People’s Party has said the migrants will overwhelm public services which are already under strain. The far-right Vox party has claimed that the government will prompt an “invasion” of migrants.
On the Costa del Sol, Bill Anderson, a retired teacher from Edinburgh who has lived in Spain for 26 years, says he can understand the reasoning behind the government’s scheme.
Migrant street vendors known as manteros selling at Ramblas in Barcelona. The Spanish government wants to bring people out of the ‘black economy’ with its amnesty scheme (Photo: Photographer: Lobro78/ Getty Images)
However, at the same time he says it rankles among British expatriates and Spaniards.
“I can appreciate why the government has chosen to do this because it gets these migrants paying tax and social security instead of working on the black economy,” he told The i Paper.
“But that said, it is also annoying for many Brits who have had to jump through lots of hoops to stay in the country since Brexit if they want to be residents, or for those who want to move over here now who need visas.”
Anderson added: “If they want more people to come and work in their economy, why not make it easier for Brits and other people from non-EU countries to come over here, get work, pay taxes and buy houses?”
Anderson, 68, who was a local councillor for four years for the People’s Party in Mijas Costa, near Málaga, says his Spanish wife is “not too happy about the situation”.
Dozens of immigrants queue at Valencia City Hall in February. Irregular immigrants have been queuing at consulates, police stations and town halls to obtain a criminal record certificate or consular authorisation, a prerequisite for regularisation (Photo: Rober Solsona/Europa Press via Getty Images)
Outside the Pakistani consulate in Barcelona, scores of migrants were waiting to secure proof they did not have criminal records in their home countries.
Haides Himm, 19, said that once he received his legal papers, he might head for London because he had family links to the UK.
“I have been in Spain for two years, living illegally. I have not been able to work as I do not have legal papers. But once I do, I want to find work here,” he told The i Paper in near-perfect English.
“If I see a job in England, I might go there. It depends on what the best option is.”
The Spanish government has said it expects the scheme to benefit around half a million people, but others have suggested that many more could be eligible.
Hundreds of Pakistanis queue at the Pakistani Consulate General in Barcelona in January (Photo: Marc Asensio/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Funcas, a Madrid-based think-tank, said there were about 840,000 undocumented migrants in Spain.
About 760,000 of these are from Latin America, while 50,000 are from African countries and 14,000 are from Europe.
Police unions have warned that the sheer number of applications could overwhelm the system.
Last week, immigration officers called off a proposed strike aimed at highlighting how the regularisation of so many migrants might stretch resources and manpower after the government offered to raise pay for staff from July.
It is not the first time Spain has opened its doors to migrants. Between 1986 and 2005, more than one million people were regularised in six separate schemes.