00:00This is Apropos.
00:04At a time of rising anti-migrant sentiment and rhetoric across much of Europe,
00:09one country stands out for bucking the trend.
00:12The Spanish Prime Minister has announced plans to grant legal status
00:15to half a million undocumented migrants and asylum seekers.
00:19The government says it will provide residency and work permits to all foreigners
00:23who arrived in the country before the end of December,
00:26as long as they've lived in Spain for at least five months and have no criminal record.
00:31With the details, here's James at Vazina.
00:35It's a move that goes against the current tide.
00:38As countries across Europe adopt tougher speech and stances on immigration,
00:43Spain has chosen another path.
00:46Between April and June, an estimated 500,000 to over 800,000 undocumented workers
00:51and asylum seekers who've spent at least five months in the country
00:55will be able to apply for residency.
00:58One of the essential requirements is not having a criminal record.
01:04Individuals participating in this process who meet the requirements
01:07will be able to obtain a legal residence permit in Spain
01:10with an initial validity of one year.
01:14After this period, they can transition to statuses provided in current regulations
01:19allowing for full and progressive integration into the system.
01:22Their children will be given a five-year permit.
01:28These decisions were adopted via a royal decree bypassing parliament
01:31in order to integrate the mostly Latin American and North African workers,
01:36many of whom contribute to the country's agricultural, tourism and service sectors,
01:41the backbone of Spain's booming economy.
01:45Spain's economy grew by 2.8% last year.
01:48That's almost double of that of the entire Eurozone.
01:51And Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez says that immigrants are key to sustaining the workforce.
01:57But the plan has attracted criticism from opposing parties,
02:01with the Conservative Popular Party saying that the move will attract more migrants.
02:05Even Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, hit out at the government.
02:10And Sanchez's reply was the following.
02:13Some say we've gone too far, that we're going against the current.
02:18But I would like to ask you, when did recognising rights become something radical?
02:24When did empathy become something exceptional?
02:27Spain is above all a welcoming country.
02:30And this is the path we choose.
02:32Dignity, community and justice.
02:36This isn't the first time that Spain is implementing such a plan.
02:39In 2005, it granted amnesty to 600,000 migrants,
02:43who were able to enter the legal labour markets and pay tax on their earnings.
02:47To discuss, let's bring in Nando Sigona,
02:52Professor of International Migration and Forced Displacement at the University of Birmingham.
02:57Thanks so much for being with us on the programme.
03:00So why, as we saw in that report there,
03:03anti-immigration policies sweeping across an awful lot of Europe.
03:07So why then is Spain moving in a different direction
03:10or going against the current, as the Prime Minister said there?
03:13The economy of Spain at the moment is particularly strong.
03:18Spain is also, as is one of the few sort of liberal central-left government in Europe at the moment,
03:26has also taken a very critical position against Donald Trump,
03:29that in a way is fronting the anti-migration group across the West.
03:35They also have actually the example of the 2005 regularisation,
03:40that they have data that show that the regularisation of 500,000 people
03:47actually contributed to the economy.
03:49There is no evidence that the migrants that were regularised
03:52would be a weight on the welfare state.
03:55And actually, the important thing is that if you allow people to regularise their position,
04:00this actually create opportunities and also enable actually a more social control
04:05rather than pushing people in the underground.
04:09So when Pedro Sanchez refers there to empathy then,
04:12is it as clear-cut as that?
04:14Is this all about recognising rights as the Prime Minister is putting it?
04:18Cynics might say he's also trying to stand out from the crowd,
04:21from the opposition and trying to appeal to voters as well.
04:26I think it's also a very pragmatic choice.
04:28The thing that often we don't understand is that irregular migration is the product,
04:34almost the dark side of migration rules.
04:37You can change the rules and irregular migration changes.
04:40Just to give you an example,
04:42the largest group of undocumented migrants in Europe
04:44before the accession to Central and Eastern European countries
04:48were Romanian and Bulgarian in most Western European countries.
04:52When the country became part of the European Union,
04:55they became EU citizens.
04:55And from one day to another, those irregular migrants disappeared.
05:00So this is important.
05:01The way we approach migration and the rules that we create
05:05are what actually created conditions for people to be pushed into irregularity very often.
05:11And this is actually what Spain is doing,
05:13showing that another path is possible.
05:16And it's not the only country in Europe.
05:17Many European countries have experience of regularisation.
05:21Just to give an example, Italy just in 2020 issued a regularisation
05:25that was expected to regularise up to 800,000.
05:28In the end, it was less than 300,000 people.
05:31The Netherlands has an ongoing regularisation scheme at the moment.
05:35What is really striking is the fact that it has come out so publicly about it.
05:40It has been so sort of defending it in public.
05:42Also with this interview in English,
05:43it's really telling that it's trying to send out a message to the rest of the world.
05:47Yeah.
05:48And why exactly is he doing it now then?
05:52He's doing it now because a lot of party neurons are moving in a different direction.
05:57Partly because we are seeing the beginning of a resistance to the model
06:02that Trump is imposing on the US, the resistance to ICE, for example.
06:06So it's a good moment to show that there is a different way of doing it.
06:09If I look from the British perspective,
06:11it's interesting that in the last few months,
06:13there has been a very strong increase in immigration enforcement
06:16against undocumented migrants in the country.
06:19Then suddenly now, after what is happening in the US,
06:22they have gone much more quiet in terms of publicly supporting that kind of approach.
06:28One other reason for this is that by pushing so much enforcement removal,
06:35first, we don't address the issues because it's actually impossible
06:38to remove all the undocumented migrants because, in a way,
06:41the legislation always produces new ones in different ways.
06:44But it also creates public anxiety, feeds public anxieties about migration.
06:49What Spain is trying to do, in a sense, is to detoxify the issues of migration.
06:54And you say that this is a pragmatic decision, Nando,
06:56but how is it actually going to work in practice?
06:59There's going to be a time-limited plan, we're told.
07:02Successful applicants are going to be giving a legal residence permit
07:06with just an initial validity of one year.
07:09What happens then?
07:10The point is, and this is something that other regularisation schemes
07:15have not done in the same way,
07:17is that if you allow people 12 months to find a job
07:20and that will give them the chance to start to build a path to citizenship,
07:27and then they can go through the mainstream sort of migration schemes.
07:32There are no restrictions, for example, to the kind of jobs they have to find.
07:35There is no clear yet what will be the requirement.
07:37The important thing is the only exclusion clause at the moment
07:41is the fact of having serious criminal records.
07:45In the past, for example, Italy, when they did the regularisation,
07:50they imposed very strict rules and conditions,
07:52and this meant that a lot of people that were regularised,
07:55they were unable to then find a job that would secure them in the long term.
08:00So the less rules are imposed on the regularisation,
08:04the more opportunities open for people to find their path.
08:07And with an economy that really needs migrants,
08:11a country which has got a demographic crisis ongoing,
08:13there are opportunities for people.
08:16Yeah, because how important are immigrants actually to the Spanish economy?
08:20We might think initially of the tourism sector.
08:24It's the tourism, to some extent.
08:27I mean, there is other sectors like the building sector,
08:31the construction, real estate is one that really relies.
08:33The agriculture is by far the largest one.
08:36And one of the differences with other countries like Italy and Southern Europe
08:40is that Italy has a very informal agriculture sector.
08:44So when they try to regularise migrant workers in agriculture,
08:48it was very difficult because normally migrant workers
08:51are not given regular contracts.
08:53In Spain, the sector is more regularised,
08:56more regular in a sense, in terms of economically,
08:58and this also offers more opportunity for people to find contracts
09:01that will be necessary for to extend their stay.
09:04And Nando, there is some concern among migrants in Spain
09:08that authorities are going to struggle to manage the process
09:11of going through all of these applications
09:14and doing it within that particular window
09:16that they've put in place for themselves.
09:18Is that something that you would be concerned about?
09:21Or do you think the red tape is going to be worked through
09:23and that's really something that people in Spain
09:25who might be applying for this
09:26shouldn't really have to worry too much about?
09:28I think the logistics of running a scheme like this is challenging.
09:34It's also true that this decree,
09:37it was born as a popular legislative initiative over in 2021.
09:44So they have had, in a sense,
09:45they've had time to plan its implementations.
09:48And actually, especially in the last two years,
09:50since when the proposal went through Parliament
09:54and then has been taken up through this decree.
09:56So hopefully what is happening,
09:58they're going to diversify the way people can apply.
10:00There will be a mix of applying in person and online.
10:03And the kind of requirement that people have to submit
10:06are, in a sense, less than in other regularization.
10:09So there is less of a bureaucratic burden on the applicants.
10:13So that may make the process faster.
10:15But it's challenging.
10:16The risk that I see,
10:18and also looking, for example,
10:19at the example of the DACA program in the United States.
10:24The DACA program is the federal deportation
10:27for young undocumented migrants
10:28that was introduced in 2012 by Barack Obama.
10:32It is that when people come forward,
10:34they give their own details.
10:36These details become part of the information
10:38that the state has on people.
10:41And then what we are seeing in the US
10:43is that you change the government,
10:45you have someone like Trump in power,
10:47and those data can be weaponized against people.
10:50So this is something that is at risk,
10:52and it will be important to see
10:54how the Sanchez government
10:57is trying to secure the data
10:59not used for the opposite outcome
11:03that the regularization is for.
11:06The rest of Europe will be watching closely, I'm sure.
11:08Nando, thanks so much for being with us on the program.
11:10We'll have to leave it there.
11:11That's Nando Sigona,
11:13Professor of International Migration
11:14and Forced Displacement
11:16at the University of Birmingham.
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