Spain has announced plans to integrate tens of thousands of migrants into the job market by matching them to jobs under a new program. The scheme is an extension of the country's push to grant legal status to over half a million people who had been living in the country undocumented until recently. However, criticism against the scheme and its repercussions continues to pour in from various sides.
The job-matching strategy under Spain's regularization scheme is primarily designed to move thousands of people from irregular economies and illegal work practices to holding down regular jobs, whereby they will start paying taxes and contribute to the welfare system.
Furthermore, it also comes with the intention of stemming major labor shortages in key sectors by training migrants accordingly in those area.
In order to achieve those goals, Spain's Migration Ministry announced that it would conduct a voluntary survey among the people who are regularized under the scheme, to analyze existing skills and assess where people would like to seek out opportunities.
The government said that it will partner with the construction, tourism, transport and care sectors to match people up with jobs and coordinate the staffing of areas with severe shortages.
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"It's a huge opportunity to harness the potential of all these people who are already helping to build the country alongside us, often working in precarious conditions," Spain's Secretary of State for Migration Pilar Cancela said, announcing the inauguration of the scheme.
She also added that "real integration" into Spain would only follow once migrants found a formal job, further highlighting the importance of the program.
According to the Madrid-based Funcas think tank, which focuses on economic and social research, there are roughly 840,000 undocumented migrants currently in Spain who are working illegally.
The majority of them are believed to come from Latin America.
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Regularization scheme intended to boost Spanish economy
Cancela also old the Reuters news agency that the ambitious integration of countless foreign workers into the job market was equally intended to drive economic growth.
The government argues that regularizing the status of an estimated half million migrants will help create a younger workforce and thus give Spain a competitive edge in Europe as the general population ages across many parts of the continent, and welfare programs continue to dry up.
Official estimates say that in order to sustain the current position of Spain's welfare state, the country will require approximately 2.4 million more people paying into social security over the next decade alone.
Cancela describes Spain's approach to immigration as "smart" in both humanitarian and economic terms, saying that the regularisation scheme will do its part in making public services and pensions sustainable in the long term.
Over 90,000 applications reportedly approved
The Spanish government, under the leadership of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez had already announced a program to extend legal status to nearly 550,000 undocumented migrants in January.
The scheme became law when the bill was made a royal decree on April 16, allowing the mass regularization of about 500,000 migrants who had been living in Spain for at least five months before January 1, 2026.
According to Spain's state broadcaster TVE, a total of 549,596 people applied to be included in the program in its first month, exceeding the initially projected number of only up to 500,000 applicants by nearly 10 percent.
Cancela had said earlier that Spain could handle up to a million applications under the regularization program, while explaining that under the rules of the scheme, the number of requests submitted would outnumber the permits that would eventually be granted.
TVE further reported that the government had already granted 91,505 temporary permits under the scheme, processing around one sixth of the initial applications; however, these numbers have not been confirmed by the migration ministry.
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Far-right groups fail with application for legal injunction
The scheme, however, has also been met with criticism by far-right leaders in Spain — and indeed across Europe.
On May 22, Spain's Supreme Court held a hearing in response to a number of far-right groups, including the rightwing Vox party, filing an emergency injunction to halt the regularization.
The court, however, denied the application, saying that its specific reasons for the rejection would be announced in the coming days.
The judges have already said that they had found no evidence of any "irreparable harm" being caused to Spain by the regularization drive — as had been claimed by the plaintiffs.
Furthermore, the court also ruled that the integration of migrants who were already inside Spain outweighed the hypothetical administrative burden this might place on regional services, which was another argument brought forward by the opponents to the bill.
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According to the EFE news agency, Spain's State Attorney Teresa Peramato Martin defended the regularization policy verbally, saying that it is intended to only integrate people who are already in Spain, and that it is only a "limited" process.
In response to far-right allegations that the regularization of over half a million foreign nationals could impact the electoral census, State Attorney Martin said that the next elections would not be impacted, as voting is limited to Spanish nationals, and that no one under the scheme would qualify for citizenship so soon.
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Experts: Informal sector needs to be considered in transition phase
There are also worries that the decree could impact the irregular economy too much, after a research paper by Esade Business School warned that a previous program from 2005, in which tens of thousands of migrants were already regularized in a comparable manner, resulted in some impactful job losses in the informal sector.
The document recommends that more labor inspections be carried out to support the transition to formal employment, which Cancela agreed with, saying that her ministry would increase the rate of labor inspections.
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with Reuters, EFE