Undocumented migrants in Spain line up for access to legal status

Undocumented migrants in Spain have been lining up on streets to gain access to legal status after the country approved a Royal Decree on April 14 that will allow around half a million migrants living in Spain without legal status to apply for residence permits and work authorization.

Immigrants across Spain are scrambling to get their paperwork together and joining long queues to apply for a one-year renewable residence permit that would put them on the path to citizenship, a process open from April 15 to June 30.

Carmen, who works long hours seven days a week in Madrid to support herself and her two daughters in Peru, is one of these migrants. Her income comes from cleaning homes through an online service, which she said takes a significant cut of the payment.

“I get six to eight euros, depending on the distance. The company that owns the application charges between 10, 12 and 15 euros from the clients,” Carmen said, meaning that her income is lower than the Spanish minimum wage.

According to the Spanish government, the legal status will help protect people from abuses like this. On the day the decree was approved, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said the move shows his government is recognizing the rights of people already living in Spain.

Monica Lopez Martin, director general of the Spanish Commission for Refugees (CEAR), a non-government organization that helps refugees and migrants in the country, believes that having more people contributing to Spain’s social security system can benefit the country’s economy and its pension system.

“Giving legal status to 500,000 people who were already here among a population of 50 million is not an invasion. These are the people who mind our children, who care for our elderly, who help with housework. [Maybe they are] your doctors and nurses. With their taxes we will be able to invest more in health, invest more in education,” she said.

The new measures apply to people who were already in Spain before Jan 1, 2026, and have lived in the country continuously for at least five months, with no criminal record or security-related concerns.

The Spanish government has said that foreigners account for around 14.1 percent of Social Security contributors by the end of 2025, and immigration has been a key driver of Spain’s economic growth in recent years.

Institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and Spain’s Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility have said Spain needs between 200,000 and 250,000 migrants each year to offset a declining birth rate and an aging population.

The two-day 8th Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) Conference opened on Friday, bringing together global researchers to discuss cutting-edge AI, international collaboration and young talent development.

During the event, the world’s first general-purpose world base model — the Wujie Physis-v0.1 — was unveiled. The model acts as a core engine for AI to comprehend the real physical world, fundamentally reshaping how AI perceives and reasons about physical reality.

“All scenarios in the physical world obey the same laws of physics. For such a base model, what it learns is actually physics by nature. Eventually, it can be applied to interactive environments, embodied AI control, including the embodied brain, and even scientific predictions just like what we have demonstrated — essentially serving any downstream application scenarios that need a grasp of physical reality,” said Chen Boyuan, director of the Behavioral World Model Center at BAAI.

The academy also introduced a taxonomy for world models. Similar to the levels of autonomous driving, the system categorizes world models based on their ability to understand the physical world. The system helps sort out and define the many different technical approaches to world models that exist today.