Spain has recently announced a large-scale regularization initiative that, according to publicly available estimates, could affect approximately 500,000 undocumented migrants currently residing in the country. From a U.S. perspective, this measure should not be understood as a routine immigration adjustment, but rather as a structural intervention with consequences that extend well beyond Spain’s national borders.
The scale of the regularization is central to the analysis. A measure involving half a million people is not administratively neutral. It reshapes the legal status of a population equivalent to that of a mid-sized American city. The initiative has emerged in the context of a legislative process promoted by civil society organizations, which explicitly identify around 500,000 potential beneficiaries, as indicated in their official communications available at https://regularizacionya.com.
The critical issue is not Spain’s political decision to regularize undocumented migrants. Under European Union law, the granting of residence permits remains largely within the competence of individual Member States. The real problem lies in the technical design of the regularization itself. As currently presented, the measure does not appear to require any meaningful conditions of integration, either as a prerequisite for access to legal status or as a mandatory obligation following regularization.
No binding requirements related to stable employment, language proficiency, civic integration, or measurable social anchoring are built into the scheme. Legal status is granted primarily on the basis of physical presence. From a legal standpoint, this transforms the residence permit into a purely administrative act of recognition, detached from any structured integration process.
For an American audience, the implications become clearer when one understands how the European Schengen system works. Unlike the United States, where immigration status is federal and mobility across states is internal, Europe operates through a hybrid system. While residence permits are issued nationally, their effects are transnational. Under Article 21 of the Schengen Implementing Convention, holders of a valid residence permit issued by one Schengen state may circulate freely for short stays across the entire Schengen Area. This legal effect is automatic and does not require authorization from other states.
As a result, a mass regularization carried out by a single country produces spillover effects across the whole European space. When legal status is granted without integration requirements, the residence permit effectively becomes a mobility document, not an integration tool. Individuals regularized in Spain gain lawful access to circulate across multiple European countries, even though no substantive integration has occurred in the issuing state.
This creates a structural asymmetry. The decision to regularize is national, but the consequences are European. Other Member States bear the indirect effects of a legal status they did not grant and whose conditions they did not define. From a systems perspective, this resembles a federal externality problem: one jurisdiction adopts a policy whose downstream effects are borne by others.
European immigration law has traditionally attempted to mitigate this risk by linking enhanced legal status to integration. EU directives on long-term residence and family reunification explicitly allow states to require integration measures as a condition for accessing more secure rights. The underlying logic is simple: legal stability must be earned through social participation and compliance with shared rules.
Spain’s regularization initiative departs from this logic. By severing the link between legal status and integration, it introduces a model of unconditional regularization. This approach stands in direct contrast to the paradigm of “Integration or Return,” which frames lawful stay as conditional. Under this model, integration is not symbolic or optional; it is the legal and social justification for remaining. Where integration does not occur, return is not punitive, but coherent with the rule-based structure of migration governance.
The absence of integration requirements has long-term consequences. It weakens the credibility of legal status as a tool for social cohesion, shifts integration costs onto other jurisdictions, and undermines trust between states operating within a shared mobility framework. In practical terms, it risks turning regularization into a shortcut to continental mobility rather than a pathway to stable inclusion.
From a comparative standpoint, this would be equivalent to a U.S. state granting a legal status that automatically confers rights across the entire federal system, without any federal coordination or integration benchmarks. The European Union, much like a federal system, depends on shared responsibility and mutual trust. Policies that disrupt this balance raise systemic concerns.
In conclusion, Spain’s mass regularization does not pose a problem of legal authority, but of legal coherence. Regularizing approximately 500,000 people without binding integration conditions empties legal status of its substantive function and converts it into a de facto mobility instrument. For the Schengen system, this represents a critical precedent. Without integration, regularization does not produce stability; it exports uncertainty across borders.
Fabio Loscerbo
Attorney at Law (Italy)
Registered EU Transparency Lobbyist
ID 280782895721-36
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