In Spain, regularising undocumented migrants could counter labour shortages

This article is reserved for our subscribers

“Living without papers is like living inside an invisible prison”, utters Lamine Sarr with a voice clipped and filled with impotence. The 40-year-old, who crossed the sea from Senegal to reach Spain eighteen years ago is one of the spokesperson of Regularización Ya, a popular platform calling for the Spanish state to regularise the legal situation of thousands of undocumented migrants and to change the current immigration law to put an end to this situation.

Thousands of people live without legal documents in Europe, around 700,000 in Spain. However, Sarr’s platform, which was created after the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighted the vulnerability of undocumented people. It could achieve the extraordinary regularisation of 500,000 of them following parliamentary discussions in September 2024.

Backed by 700,000 signatures and a coalition of 900 civil society groups, Regularización Ya managed to get this popular legislative initiative into the Spanish Congress and the text is now going through the regular legislative process.

“The regularisation initiative is of vital importance”, Caritas Spain tells Voxeurop, one of the organisations calling on parties to finally make this bill a reality. “We consider it necessary in order to alleviate the enormous amount of migrants in an irregular situation in Spain”, whose irregular status, they claim, keeps them “living under continuous stress and anxiety”, and “prevents them from fully engaging in the life of the community.”

The undocumented’s invisible prison

The current migration law in Spain requires people in an irregular situation to prove that they have lived on Spanish territory for three years in order to obtain a work and residence permit, among other things. However, Lamine Sarr claims that the reality is much more complex than it seems.

After arriving in Spain via dinghy in 2006, he was only able to acquire legal papers until 2019, thirteen years later. “When you have been here for three years, it means that you can begin to process your application, but it does not mean that you are able to finish the process”, he tells Voxeurop. Some of his colleagues, he says, have been waiting for 20 years for their residence permits to be issued.