by Dr Gül Ince-Beqo & Dr Maurizio Ambrosini, University of Milan
On 29 January 2026, a short exchange on X sparked a wave of reactions across Europe’s migration debate.
A widely shared post claimed:
“Spain just legalized 500,000 illegal aliens to ‘defeat the far-right.’
It’s not even a secret anymore. This is electoral engineering.”
Elon Musk reshared the post, adding a brief “Wow.”
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez responded directly:
“Mars can wait. Humanity can’t.”
In a few sentences, a complex policy issue was reduced to a symbolic conflict. On one side, the claim that regularization is political manipulation, and on the other, the portrayal of it as a humanitarian necessity.
But beyond the viral moment, Spain’s recent regularization reform is neither a sudden mass “legalization” nor just a moral gesture. It is also a practical policy response to a structural reality faced by many European countries: when people cannot be deported, governments must decide how to handle their presence. However, regularisation cannot be understood only as a reactive measure. In cases such as Spain, it also reflects robust labour demand and a policy climate in which immigration is increasingly viewed as contributing to economic performance and labour market vitality.
This question lies at the core of the FAiR project.
The European reality: return often does not happen
Across Europe, return is officially presented as the preferred policy response to irregular stay. Yet implementation tells a different story. Legal safeguards, lack of cooperation from countries of origin, identification problems, and human-rights obligations all limit deportations.
As a result, many people remain in situations of legal and social limbo for years, neither fully included nor excluded. Spain’s situation, therefore, reflects a broader European pattern.
What Spain actually changed
The claim that Spain “legalized 500,000 migrants” suggests a blanket amnesty. In reality, the reform expands and streamlines existing legal pathways, particularly labour-related and humanitarian permits. These measures do not automatically grant citizenship or political rights. They create regulated channels for people already present and often already working. In other words, this is not about importing voters; it is about governing a population that is already there. Migration governance does not operate on a blank slate. States must manage the realities on their territory, even when those realities do not match political rhetoric.
Spain’s long-standing approach
Spain, like Italy, has repeatedly used regularisation as a policy tool over the past decades, reflecting features of its migration model and labour market structure. This trajectory has not been linear, however. Both countries at certain points shifted from large-scale regularisations to more selective, case-by-case procedures, partly in response to criticism that mass “sanatorie” encouraged irregularity. The recent return to broader regularisation initiatives thus signals a renewed policy turn under changing economic and political conditions.
Scholars often describe Spain as a “thin enforcement regime” a context where return enforcement capacity is limited and where labour market demand and social embeddedness shape policy choices.
Sectors such as agriculture, care, hospitality, and construction rely heavily on migrant labour. Regularisation helps formalize employment, collect taxes, and reduce vulnerability to exploitation. From this perspective, regularisation would be one of the ways states can retake control on the resident population.
Regularisation: not only about humanity
Prime Minister Sánchez framed his reply to Musk in humanitarian terms. And humanitarian considerations do matter, particularly in cases involving families, long-term residents, or vulnerable individuals. At the same time, regularisation is also a pragmatic governance choice.
When large numbers of people cannot be returned, prolonged irregularity creates costs:
- Economic costs: shadow economies and lost tax revenue
- Administrative costs: repeated procedures with limited results
- Social costs: precarious living conditions and exploitation
- Political costs: visible policy failure and legitimacy concerns
Regularisation can reduce these costs by bringing people into formal systems.
FAiR research highlights that irregularity is often reproduced by policy contradictions, not only by migrant strategies. Regularisation thus can be a way to address these contradictions. Seen this way, it is not the opposite of control but a form of governance.
The politics of regularisation
Regularisation remains controversial because critics worry about fairness and potential “pull factors.”
Yet evidence that regularisations alone drive migration remains limited. Decisions to migrate are shaped more by conflict, inequality, and social networks than by distant policy signals.
At the same time, purely restrictive approaches also face limits. Detention without removal prospects is expensive and often challenged in courts. Policies that produce visible hardship can trigger public discomfort, especially when they affect well-integrated migrants.
Migration governance therefore involves balancing control, rights, and legitimacy. FAiR findings underline that legitimacy depends on this balance.
Spain as part of a broader European story
Spain’s reform does not mark the end of return policies. Like other European countries, Spain continues to invest in border control and return cooperation. It also acknowledges a reality: not everyone can be returned. When this happens, states develop other tools such as regularisation, toleration statuses, humanitarian permits, or informal acceptance. These are recurring features of migration governance.
A takeaway for the return debate
The viral exchange between Musk and Sánchez turned migration policy into a moral soundbite. But policy decisions are rarely only moral or only political. They are also administrative and economic. In this context, regularisation is one tool among many for managing situations where return alone cannot deliver, and no miracle solution nor a scandal.