Hundreds of migrants queue in Barcelona for paperwork after scheme allowing 500,000 to work announced
The left wing government will allow some migrants up to one year of legal residency and permission to work
Huge numbers of migrants queued on the streets of Barcelona to collect paperwork, after the Spanish government announced it would grant legal status to half a million immigrants.
Listen to this article
Hundreds of people were seen waiting outside the Pakistani consulate in Barcelona to apply for a criminal record certificate.
The documents are required for the Spanish migrant regularisation programme, which foreign nationals are scrambling to apply for.
It comes after Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced his government would grant legal status to 500,000 undocumented migrants.
The left wing government will allow up to one year of legal residency and permission to work.
The policy has provoked fury on the right, as Vox party leader Santiago Abascal accused Sanchez of "hating Spaniards" and "accelerating an invasion".
Read More: Tributes paid to British mother, 33, stabbed to death at her home in Spain
The Prime Minister argued that immigrants are key to the Spanish economy, which expanded by 2.8 percent last year, more than twice the average expected in the entire eurozone.
He also pointed out that Spain has an ageing population and low birth rate, meaning immigrants could help sustain the country's withering workforce.
But Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the Popular Party (PP), said the scheme would "increase the pull effect and overwhelm our public services".
Tech billionaire Elon Musk posted a link on X - which he owns - to a post by a man named Ian Miles Cheong who called the plan "electoral engineering", along with the comment: "Wow."
"Spain just legalized 500,000 illegal aliens to 'defeat the far-right'," Cheong wrote in the post which has had over 12 million views.
"The logic is simple: legalise half a million people, fast-track them to citizenship (which takes as little as two years for many), and you've effectively imported a massive, loyal voting bloc that's indebted to the left," he continued.
"Today is a historic day," said Elma Saiz, Spain's minister of inclusion, social security and migration, when the plan was launched.
"We are reinforcing a migratory model based on human rights, integration, co-existence and which is compatible with economic growth and social cohesion," she said.
More than 3,000 people died trying to reach Spain by sea in 2025, according to a report by the NGO Caminando Frontera.
This included 192 women and 437 children.
This is a drop from the 10,457 people who died in the attempt in 2024 - potentially due to tighter border controls.