Regularising undocumented migrants could counter looming labour shortages

“Living without papers is like living inside an invisible prison”, utters Lamine Sarr with a voice clipped and filled with impotence. The 40-year-old, who crossed the sea from Senegal to reach Spain eighteen years ago is one of the spokesperson of Regularización Ya, a popular platform calling for the Spanish state to regularise the legal situation of thousands of undocumented migrants and to change the current immigration law to put an end to this situation.

Thousands of people live without legal documents in Europe, around 700,000 in Spain. However, Sarr’s platform, which was created after the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighted the vulnerability of undocumented people. It could achieve the extraordinary regularisation of 500,000 of them following parliamentary discussions in September 2024.

Backed by 700,000 signatures and a coalition of 900 civil society groups, Regularización Ya managed to get this popular legislative initiative into the Spanish Congress and the text is now going through the regular legislative process.

“The regularisation initiative is of vital importance”, Caritas Spain tells Voxeurop, one of the organisations calling on parties to finally make this bill a reality. “We consider it necessary in order to alleviate the enormous amount of migrants in an irregular situation in Spain”, whose irregular status, they claim, keeps them “living under continuous stress and anxiety”, and “prevents them from fully engaging in the life of the community.”

Undocumentation’s invisible prison

The current migration law in Spain requires people in an irregular situation to prove that they have lived on Spanish territory for three years in order to obtain a work and residence permit, among other things. However, Lamine Sarr claims that the reality is much more complex than it seems.

After arriving in Spain via dinghy in 2006, he was only able to acquire legal papers until 2019, thirteen years later. “When you have been here for three years, it means that you can begin to process your application, but it does not mean that you are able to finish the process”, he tells Voxeurop. Some of his colleagues, he says, have been waiting for 20 years for their residence permits to be issued.

Waiting three years in the country without working is also not a viable option for those fleeing from their home countries and arriving in Spain in search of safety. The Ministry of the Interior’s Asylum and Refugee Office received 163,218 applications for international protection in 2023, 37% more than in the previous year and the highest number since the office’s creation in 1992. At the same time, it only granted international protection (refugee status or subsidiary protection) to 11,163 people. According to the Spanish Commission for Refugee Assistance’s data, Spain has one of the EU’s lowest approval rates, 12% in 2023 compared to the European average of 42%.

“You can’t rent a house, you can’t open a bank account, you can’t live in peace because if you walk down the street a patrol can identify you and take you to jail… The only thing you can do is work in the informal economy in total vulnerability,” he says.

Leïla Bodeux, Senior Policy and Advocacy Officer at Caritas Europe, stresses that the situation is particularly painful for children born in Europe who remain undocumented for years because of their parents’ circumstances. “They are unable to project themselves into the future and feel frustrated at being treated differently from the local population, especially considering their sense of belonging and feeling at home in the country where they live.”

“The immigration law steals your dream”, states Sarr painfully. “You come here young with the dream of being something, and when you arrive you are treated as nobody … It is as if you were a person with an empty mind who does not know how to do anything.”

Regularised or not, migrants improve our societies

Research shows that migrants, whether regularised or not, contribute a great deal to their host communities and could contribute even more if they were all allowed to do so legally.

In Spain, the Por Causa research centre found that the net direct fiscal contribution of an immigrant household was already 75% higher than the average Spanish household, mainly because the average age of immigrant households is much younger. The same report also showed that, in four of the six profiles analysed, regularisation would allow immigrants to contribute far more than they receive from public budgets – in two cases the contributions would neutralise the costs to the state.

At the European level, the picture remains the same. Earlier this year, economists at Leiden University in the Netherlands published a research paper showing that “migrants cost most of the countries in the study (15 European member states between 2007 and 2018) less than the native-born population did”. In 2020, the European Commission’s Foresight service had pointed out that the net fiscal impact of immigration was minimal: meaning that “migrants contribute as much to public finances in taxes as they receive in benefits”. It also cited a JRC simulation showing that the short-term costs of refugee integration in EU member states could be significantly outweighed by socio-economic and fiscal benefits, with a long-term annual GDP effect of 0.2% to 1.4% above baseline growth. Depending on the method of integration and its costs, a full return on investment in integration policies could be achieved after nine to 19 years.

Migrant households also provide a large proportion of the workers that make up the essential services in our society. A study published in 2020 showed that 13% of key workers in the EU are immigrants – a figure that rises to 33% if we consider lower-skilled sectors with more difficult working conditions.

Bodeux reminds us that, while regularisation is considered a taboo by some, countries such as Italy and Portugal have used it to address labour shortages. Ultimately, these regularisation mechanisms will become a necessity given the ageing issues that many European countries will face in the future.

Data from the OECD suggests that the working age population will decline in many countries. Spain represents one of the most dramatic cases: there, the weight of the over-64 age group in the total population has more than doubled in the last 50 years, reaching more than 20% in 2023.

With the arrival of foreigners becoming virtually the only source of population growth, a spokesperson for the Bank of Spain assured in April 2024 that 24 million migrant workers would be needed over the next 30 years to maintain the ratio of workers to pensioners and thus sustain the country’s pension system.

But it will take much more than an extraordinary wave of regularisation. Viviane Ogou Corbi, a policy consultant on migration and EU-Africa affairs, believes that the whole Spanish and European migration system has to change.

Changing the migration paradigm

“Within the anti-racist [movement] and many other movements in which nationality intersects, there is a call for a modification of the immigration law to one much more open and one that allows these people to work, to contribute to the social security system from the beginning and to, above all, have their rights guaranteed”, Viviane tells Voxeurop. This, however, contrasts with the current vocabulary being used to discuss migration in the European political landscape.

The new EU Pact on Migration and Asylum voted by the European Parliament on April 2024, which sets out new rules for the management of migration at EU level in the coming years, states that one of its objectives is to determine “whether applications are unfounded or

inadmissible and to swiftly return those with no right to stay”. Secure external borders are one of the four pillars of the pact, which will be reflected in a strengthened role for security agencies such as Frontex, as well as into the continuation of deals with third countries such as the ones with Egypt, Tunisia and Mauritania.

“What is necessary throughout Europe is a movement against the new pact and a movement in favour of a complete change of paradigm at European level, which must undoubtedly be a guarantee paradigm that recognises migration as a human reality that cannot be stopped”, Viviane argues. However, she acknowledges that European legislation does not provide for a mechanism to impose periodic waves of regularisation, and that it is therefore up to the member states to take the lead.

“What we hope is that institutions are coherent and that they respect the will of the more than 700,000 people who signed for this bill to pass”, says Sarr, alluding to the Spanish regularisation initiative. He hopes that the political bodies that regulate migration at Spanish and European level will also take into account the recommendations of experts on the benefits of welcoming migrants. “They started fighting to close the borders,” he argues, “but they will soon fight each other to bring us in.”

Original source: https://voxeurop.eu/en/spain-regularising-undocumented-migrants-labour-shortages/