The Spanish Government has announced that it will approve that it will benefit more than half a million foreigners who already reside in the country. The measure, which is expected to be presented this Tuesday in the Council of Ministers, establishes that those who can prove that they have been in Spain before December 31, have no criminal record and have remained in the country for at least five months at the time of the application will be eligible.
The announcement comes at a time when most Member States and the European Commission have chosen to toughen their immigration policies and while the rise of the extreme right has given new impetus to anti-immigration discourse on the continent. However, other European countries have adopted similar prerogatives to guarantee the rights of beneficiaries, respond to contingencies such as the covid-19 pandemic or take pressure off their bureaucratic systems. These are some examples.
France
The last major regularization of immigrants occurred in 1997-1998, during the Government of Lionel Jospin. The initiative allowed some 80,000 people in an irregular situation to be legalized. Since then, immigration policy has been oriented towards individual regularizations, through administrative tools such as the Valls circular. [por el entonces ministro del Interior, Manuel Valls] in 2012 and, more recently, the Retailleau circular [por el ex ministro Bruno Retailleau].
In his circular, Retailleau reminded government delegates that “regularization is not a right.” “Recourse to this mechanism must continue to be exceptional,” he noted. Since then, the volume of regularizations has fallen by around 42%, according to data published by The World at the end of 2025. This decrease affects almost all categories: regularizations for work reasons fell by 54%, as well as regularizations for private and family life, which fell by 58%, reaching below 4,000. Only the regularization of former unaccompanied minors [que han alcanzado la mayoría de edad y están en formación profesional] has increased.
Italia
In Italy, with the second government of Giuseppe Conte (a coalition of the Five Star Movement and the center-left Democratic Party). It received 220,000 applications, mainly in the field of domestic work, care of dependent people and agriculture. Its application was controversial due to the inefficiency of the administration when processing the applications, and in fact a part is still pending resolution. In fact, the instrument most used in Italy for more than two decades to legalize the residence of foreigners is the so-called migratory flow decree, which seeks to order the entry of immigrants based on labor demand.
The latest decree approved by the Government of the far-right Giorgia Meloni foresees the entry of 500,000 people between 2026 and 2028. It is a highly criticized system. In theory, these are foreigners who are outside Italy and want to enter the country, and respond to employers’ requests for personnel, by quotas for labor sectors, through a system criticized for its lack of transparency and irregularities. In reality it is often a covert regularization of those who are already in the country in an irregular situation.
Portugal
The Portuguese Government announced in 2020 that of all immigrants who had pending residence authorization, in an attempt to alleviate the impact of the covid-19 pandemic and to resolve the bureaucratic problems following the declaration of the state of emergency. The measure, promoted by the Administration of socialist António Costa, provisionally benefited more than 356,000 people that year, according to official data.
The measure allowed access to public services, such as health care, and social security benefits. In 2024, the conservative tightened the country’s immigration policy and closed that fast track to regularize hundreds of thousands of immigrants to “end some mechanisms that have become an excessive abuse of our capacity to welcome immigrants,” as the prime minister argued.
Greece
In 2023, the Greek Parliament approved by a large majority (262 out of 300 deputies) a proposal to grant residence and work permits to some 30,000 immigrants due to the labor shortage in the country, especially in the sectors of agriculture, construction and the tourism industry. The authorities also sought to combat informal employment. That amendment reduced the number of years required to obtain a work permit, three instead of seven. Applicants were also asked to have no criminal record and to submit a job offer. In 2024, more than 43,000 immigrants requested this permit to work in the country, according to data from the Mediterranean Migration and Asylum Policy Hub. The country already had a program to regularize immigrants who have resided in the country for at least seven years, which has allowed the legal stay of more than 23,000 applicants.
Belgium
Belgium is one of the countries that is currently in favor of stricter immigration rules both at European and national level, where in recent years it has tightened asylum and family reunification rules. “Belgium’s era as a preferred asylum destination has come to an end,” the Minister of Asylum and Migration, Anneleen Van Bossuyt, proclaimed in mid-January, announcing a 13.1% drop in the number of asylum applications in 2025, after the arrival of the coalition government of Prime Minister Bart de Wever, from the Flemish nationalist party N-VA (like her Minister of Migration). But it is a policy that was also promoted by his predecessor, the liberal Alexander De Croo, who experienced one of the most extreme struggles under his mandate: in 2021, almost 500 irregular immigrants carried out a harsh hunger strike that lasted more than 60 days to demand their legalization after years of clandestinity. The only thing they achieved was a commitment from the Government – repeatedly criticized and even condemned by the European Court of Human Rights for not providing accommodation to thousands of asylum seekers – that they would analyze the situation on a case-by-case basis.
Historically, in Belgium, a country that, due to its European centrality and multiple borders, is a common place of transit and even stay for migrants, only three major mass regularization campaigns for undocumented immigrants have been carried out: the first was in 1974, when some 7,500 foreign workers who had been left in an irregular situation benefited after, four years earlier, the country decided to stop issuing residence permits for people who arrived in Belgium with a tourist visa but found a job. We had to wait more than two decades, until 1999, for the second mass regularization to take place, 40,000 people who were able to obtain papers thanks to a change in criteria in the law, while another 25,000 more were regularized in 2009, the last time a Belgian government accepted a mass regularization.
Germany
At the end of 2022, the “right of residence based on opportunities” regulations came into force in Germany for a period of three years. The new regulation, which concluded at the end of 2025, granted the possibility of legalizing their situation to people who had been in the country for a long time and to those who had not been deported for administrative or humanitarian reasons. These people found themselves in a kind of legal limbo, without a residence permit and often with work restrictions.
The regulations established that only people who, as of October 31, 2022, had been living in Germany uninterruptedly for at least five years—some 137,000 according to official figures—could apply for the right of residence for opportunities for a period of 18 months, which they could later convert to indefinite under a series of requirements such as demonstrating basic knowledge of German and economic income to largely guarantee their livelihood. If these requirements were not met, after 18 months they would be in the same irregular situation again.
In the first year and a half after its entry into force, more than 76,000 people were granted the right of residence based on opportunities. In addition to the time requirement, applicants could not have been convicted of a crime or repeatedly misled about their identity or nationality. The members of the nuclear family who lived with the regularized person also obtained the same permit even if they had not been in the country for five years. This measure was intended to encourage integration into the labor market and clarify the identity of migrants, something that the German Government wanted to achieve since during the so-called refugee crisis in 2015, more than a million foreigners entered the country without papers.
With information from Daniel Verdu, íñiñigo Dominguez, Silvia Ayuso, Almudena de Cabo y Elias Camhaji.
