Spain to offer legal status to 500,000 undocumented migrants

Daniel Basteiro, Bloomberg News on Jan 26, 2026

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MADRID — Spain will approve an extraordinary grant of legal status to undocumented migrants on Tuesday, the government said in a statement.

The move aims to “guarantee rights and provide legal certainty to an existing social reality.” About half a million people could benefit, provided they were in Spain before Dec. 31, have no criminal record and can prove at least five months of uninterrupted residence in the country.

With nearly 50 million inhabitants, Spain is the fastest-growing large economy in Europe. Its GDP is forecast to expand 2.2% in 2026, compared with 1.2% for the euro area as a whole, according to the Bank of Spain. Part of that growth reflects stronger private consumption and population gains.

Since the pandemic, foreign workers registered with the social security system, an indicator of formal employment, have risen 45%, government data show, accounting for 14% of the total.

Still, hundreds of thousands of workers in Spain remain in an irregular administrative situation. In 2024, petitions signed by more than 600,000 citizens backed an initiative calling for a mass grant of legal status, which secured a broad majority in the Congress of Deputies.

The socialist government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is an outlier on migration policy. While other countries have moved to tighten entry requirements and expel undocumented migrants, Sánchez has welcomed them, a stance also aimed at countering the aging of one of the world’s longest-lived populations.

“I’ll say it clearly. No one is expendable in Spain. On the contrary, we lack people,” Sánchez said earlier this month. “Faced with the choice between being a closed and poor nation, Spain is opening itself to the world to ensure prosperity,”

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