Spain and Latin America Take Diverging Paths on Regularization

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Spain's extraordinary regularization in 2026 could provide legal status to a record number of irregular migrants. Nearly 1.2 million people applied by the June 30 deadline, more than double the government’s original expectation of around 500,000, and two-thirds of applicants were from South or Central America. Yet even as Spain is advancing regularization, similar initiatives that were launched in Latin America to address the vast displacement from Venezuela that began in 2015 have ended or been closed to new entrants.

The approach is unusual among EU Member States, which have largely tightened access to legal status, and has provoked criticism from some EU leaders. The Spanish government sees regularization as both necessary and politically viable, given the size of the irregular population in particular and the overall foreign-born population more generally. Immigrants of all statuses accounted for a record 20.3 percent of Spain's population as of January 2026, or more than 10 million people. Nearly 300,000 acquired Spanish citizenship in 2025, which speaks to how many have made clear their migration is a permanent one. Given this reality, the government has framed the new regularization measure not only as a response to governance, fiscal, and labor-market issues but in terms of rights and worker protection. Formalized in January through Royal Decree 316/2026, the measure offers one-year residence and work permits to unauthorized migrants present in Spain before January 1, 2026, who can prove at least five months of continuous stay and a clean criminal record. At the same time, irregular migration into Spain and other EU Member States has just become more difficult, with the June implementation of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum.

Spain has long treated regularization not as an exceptional concession, but as a tool for occasionally managing the gap between migration realities and legal frameworks. Between 1986 and 2005, under governments of different political parties, the country carried out six mass regularization processes, collectively granting legal status to approximately 1.2 million immigrants. The largest of these came in 2005, when some 600,000 people were regularized in a process praised as pragmatic by supporters and criticized by other EU Member States worried about the prospect of regularized migrants moving onward within the bloc; those concerns never came to pass. Since 2004, the government has also offered temporary residence permits to irregular migrants who meet certain thresholds for having established roots in the country, usually after several years of residence, through the arraigo process.

Of the estimated 838,000 unauthorized immigrants in Spain as of early 2025, about 91 percent (or 761,000 people) were from the Americas. The latest legalization provides a striking contrast to the approaches of several Latin American countries that had previously deployed innovative responses to the displacement of 7.9 million people from Venezuela since 2015. Over the last several years, they have been canceling or freezing those programs. Shortly after taking office in March, for instance, Chile's new government suspended a regularization decree that would have benefited roughly 182,000 individuals. Peru declared a border state of emergency as Venezuelans fled Chile in response to the change in power, showcasing the domino effect of that attitude reversal. Ecuador has followed a similarly restrictive trend.

It remains to be seen if Colombia will follow suit. Its recent presidential election may open a new chapter for Venezuelan migrants in the country: President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella and his running mate share the political orientation of former President Iván Duque, whose government in 2021 launched one of the most ambitious regularization efforts in the region's history, offering ten years of legal status to eligible Venezuelans.

Latin America’s retreat precisely as Spain has stepped forward raises questions about the region’s plans to govern migration, integrate its resident migrant populations, and position itself as a partner in ordered labor mobility in the years ahead. This article examines the 2026 regularization in Spain, its potential impacts, and the ramifications for Latin America.

Governance and Fiscal Gain Drivers 

Spain's new regularization was driven by a simple but often overlooked reality: Unauthorized residents were already there. The measure did not create a new population, but recognized that one had been embedded in Spain's economy, paying rent, consuming services, and working in informal arrangements that tended to leave both the state and workers worse off. Based on the effect of prior regularizations, economists estimate the regularization could bring in approximately 2.5 billion euros annually over five years in income tax and social security contributions—or about 4,900 euros per regularized migrant annually in direct net fiscal benefit. Regularization is also seen as bringing employers into legal compliance, formalizing labor relationships, and generating corporate and income tax revenues from employers and managers up the chain. Under-the-table employment, by contrast, carries legal and financial risks for employers, suppresses productivity, and locks workers out of training, contract protections, and career advancement. In the words of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the program is "an act of justice and a necessity," allowing people already living and working in the country to "do so under equal conditions.”

Latin America can point to a similar record. Research conducted by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and International Organization for Migration (IOM) on regularizations of Venezuelan migrants in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru found that legal status allowed migrants to access formal labor markets and basic services, and that economic benefits were stronger where labor regulations were enforced. Other research conducted in 2020 and 2021 found that regularized Venezuelan migrants in Colombia experienced a 22 percent increase in labor income and a 48 percent gain in consumption per capita, and that the Colombian government needed to spend less on regularized households than irregular ones. A 2024 Inter-American Development Bank study on Peru similarly found regularization improved access to written labor contracts and income.

The security argument is equally underappreciated. Regularizing migrants means that the government knows who they are, where they live, and what they do, contributing to public safety. The situation is better for the individual migrant, too; they become less likely to be exploited, more likely to report crimes, and enter the information systems that enable governance. Spain's regularization requires applicants to submit criminal background certificates from their countries of prior residence, allowing authorities to screen out and potentially remove applicants who could pose security threats. Spanish officials have underscored regularization is not an alternative to enforcement but a precondition for it.

Critics claim that regularization programs serve as a pull factor incentivizing more irregular arrivals. The evidence, on balance, does not support this. A 2024 study by Ferran Elias, Joan Monras, and Javier Vázquez-Grenno found no significant increase in immigration following Spain's 2005 regularization of 700,000 people; movement corresponded primarily to economic conditions in origin and destination countries. An International Network for Economic Research (INFER) working paper analyzing regularization programs across countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reached broadly consistent conclusions. Still, some research has found that immigration policies can affect flows at the margins, and the picture varies in different contexts.

Importantly, irregular immigrants in Spain would have had no reason to arrive anticipating the current legalization. The decree requires applicants prove five months of continuous presence in the country since before December 31, 2025. Many beneficiaries will have come years earlier, often in response to economic conditions including job availability in Spain, lack of opportunity at home, and pre-existing family networks. Moreover, irregular arrivals to Spain dropped by more than 40 percent in 2025, the year the regularization was announced. These data would not account for migrants who overstayed their visa or other legal status, however, and the high volume of applicants suggests that the irregular population may have been larger than understood. Still, arriving migrants would have had no expectation that this particular mechanism would be offered again.

Spain Feels Latin America’s Integration Failures

Spain's regularization may normalize individuals’ situation but will not transform the structural conditions that generated irregular mobility in the first place. Because the majority of irregular migrants in Spain are from Latin America—in many cases coming after failing to integrate in a prior destination country—many people will likely continue to migrate unless they are able to more sustainably remain within their home region. In this light, irregular migration to Spain is often a downstream consequence of integration failures elsewhere.

Some Latin American governments may be happy for Spain to serve as a release valve, which could reduce pressure on local services and generate remittances that migrants send back. But that calculus risks causing friction with Spain and the European Union more broadly. Meanwhile, countries that build durable integration systems may position themselves as credible partners not only in managing migration but in building the stronger trade, investment, and labor ties that well-governed mobility make possible.

The record of regional integration efforts makes the gap clear. The regularizations for Venezuelans developed by Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru were often innovative by international standards but tended to offer only temporary status, without clear pathways to permanence. In many cases, by 2022 or 2023, the programs had been reversed or frozen under political pressure. The result was a population that had been formally registered but not genuinely included: cut off from full labor market access, constrained in accessing services, and denied the prospect of permanence that turns migrants into stakeholders in the place where they live. When those conditions deteriorated or were revoked, people moved on.

The Darien Gap became the starkest measure of that failure. Between 2021 and 2024, approximately 1.2 million people traveled the extremely dangerous migration route between Colombia and Panama, with a record 520,000 in 2023 alone. Travelers’ decisions to move northward were complex: Some viewed the United States as the favored destination regardless of regional conditions; for others, challenges in South America—including frozen regularizations, labor market exclusion, and social hostility—reduced the perceived value of staying. The two explanations are not mutually exclusive but illustrate that many people did not see the region as sufficiently attractive to stay.

Spain, by contrast, had until recently granted national humanitarian protection to Venezuelans, offering approximately 240,000 permits since 2018. The government stopped granting or renewing the permits for Venezuelans on June 12, in the midst of the new regularization process and following the enactment of the European Pact on Migration and Asylum; holders are now able to apply for four-year residence and work permits.

Europe’s Borders Are Tightening

The external environment is now shifting in ways that raise the stakes considerably. The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum entered into force on June 12, tightening enforcement, harmonizing asylum processes, and significantly strengthening borders across Member States. The route to Spain through irregular channels will therefore become far more difficult. The pressure is compounded by a broader recalibration of Europe's visa architecture: Nationals of Bolivia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Haiti already face Schengen visa requirements, and growing political pressure within the European Union could erode the exemptions that nationals of other Latin American and Caribbean countries enjoy. Governments are learning they must engage with migration governance as a strategic necessity, rather than passively relying on open access. At the same time, the European Union has been pressing Member States to strengthen regular pathways through instruments such as the nascent EU Talent Pool, in order to facilitate regular labor migration to fill workforce shortages and address demographic pressures, especially as irregular routes narrow. Still, decisions on admission and labor-migration policy remain largely in the hands of Member States.

The implication for the Americas is twofold: The back door is closing, and the front door requires more deliberate bilateral work to open. Rather than another round of one-off regularizations, Latin American countries may be prompted to consider genuine inclusion strategies—sustained access to the labor market access and public services, as well as clear pathways to permanence —that give people a real reason to stay and give Spain a real partner to work with on managed, orderly flows. Spain's Migration Minister Elma Saiz has been explicit on this point, describing bilateral cooperation on circular migration as advantageous for both sides and stressing the need for "effective management of human mobility" through structured partnerships. Spain has put financial resources behind that vision, allocating 890,000 euros in 2024 to a World Bank-managed program to develop labor mobility corridors with Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Ecuador.

One Door Closes, but Another May Be Opening 

Latin America may come to see Spain's regularization as a strategic opening. Spain will now need to absorb hundreds of thousands of newly regularized migrants into its formal labor market, a process that will take time to stabilize, and the government has announced an integration plan backed by a special budget. But over the long term, the country will likely continue to need new workers from abroad. One in five Spaniards was 65 or older as of 2024, the country’s pension system is under structural pressure, and its labor force requires sustained replenishment. The 2026 regularization may buy Spain time, but it is unlikely to resolve the underlying demographic arithmetic. Soon, the question becomes where the next cohort comes from—and through what channels.

Spain is, by some distance, the most consequential European migration partner for the Latin America and Caribbean region. In 2025, it received 24 percent of all non-EU migrants arriving in the bloc (roughly 1 million people), more than any other Member State. Having granted status to the previously irregular population and now operating under a stricter EU regime, Spain will have every incentive to build legal labor pathways with origin countries. The conditions for cooperation are, in other words, more favorable than they have been in years.

The natural partners seem clear. Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Honduras all have active labor migration agreements with Spain; origin-country recruitment (contratación en origen) exists but remains limited in scope. To ramp up this labor migration, policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic will need to design the architecture that would make it viable and sustainable at a larger scale. That would likely involve defining priority sectors in Spain with genuine labor shortages, streamlining skills certification and credential recognition of migrants, clarifying contractual parameters and worker protections, and reducing the administrative friction that can make irregular migration channels faster and cheaper than legal ones.

The closing of the irregular route and the opening of a more structured bilateral space may align the incentives at both ends. Latin American governments may be interested in seizing that moment by streamlining the administrative processes workers must navigate before departure, investing in skills certification and credential recognition so that labor demand and supply can be matched more efficiently, designating institutional counterparts with the authority and capacity to manage bilateral recruitment, and ensure returning workers and their families can reintegrate in ways that make circular mobility credible and repeatable. These are reforms are possible but they would require sustained attention and political commitment that has often been absent.

A Window to Develop and Deepen Partnerships?

Spain's regularization model may not be able to be replicated elsewhere—and in fact has been greeted with dismay elsewhere in Europe, where governments across the political spectrum have been focused on increasing returns of migrants who lack a pathway to remain. But it offers a demonstration that regularization, when grounded in fiscal logic, labor market need, and clear governance priorities, can be both politically defensible and economically productive. The ultimate beneficiaries are not just the migrants who gain legal status but the broader societies—Spanish and foreign alike—that gain more ordered, productive, and rights-respecting migration systems.

Latin America could respond to this moment by investing in integration and labor migration systems, but the region’s time is limited. Political cycles, the new EU Pact, and the fluctuations in Spain's labor market as it integrates a newly formalized workforce are all factors that will shape future migration. Moving now to deepen bilateral cooperation, revive Latin America’s integration agenda, and build the institutional infrastructure for orderly labor mobility will likely better position it for what comes next. Waiting will likely mean that the window for cooperation has closed, and that people, as they always do, will have found another way to move.

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