Overview
- The one-off regularisation window closed on Tuesday, June 30, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced that more than one million applications had been submitted.
- Spanish authorities have three months to check files and may grant residence-and-work permits that are valid only in Spain.
- Applicants needed at least five months’ presence in Spain as of January 1 and a clean criminal record; an internal government source recently said about 360,000 of roughly 900,000 earlier filings had already been judged receivable.
- Sánchez framed the measure as a human-rights and economic policy and unveiled a Plan of Integration and Citizenship with an initial €500 million to support job search, training and local integration.
- Issued by royal decree because the government lacks a parliamentary majority, the scheme is the seventh modern regularisation and has drawn sharp criticism from the PP and Vox while business groups welcomed it as a way to ease labour shortages.