Spain could see five million more migrants with “legal” status in the country by 2030 as a consequence of socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s ongoing mass amnesty plans, Spain’s National Police reportedly warned authorities through internal reports.
Spain’s socialist government is presently carrying out a widely-controversial mass amnesty process that will soon see half a million illegal migrants in Spain receive “legal” work and residence permits. Migration specialists at Spain’s National Police, however, have reportedly warned to the nation’s Interior Ministry that it is highly likely that beneficiaries of the amnesty will end up availing themselves of family reunification chain migration methods that exist in Spanish laws to bring their relatives into the country in the following years.
Unnamed police officers spoke with the Spanish outlet El Español and affirmed the existence of the reports issued by the police to the Ministry. In the reports, the National Police projects that the Spanish socialist government will grant “legal status” to as many as 1.5 million illegal in the coming years — an amount three times higher than the “half a million” that will receive amnesty once the ongoing mass amnesty process ends.
According to El Español, the reports emphasize that if the trend continues at “the same pace as it has so far,” it is very likely that if each and every one of the projected 1.5 million migrants brings an average of four family members. As such, Spain could end up having five more million migrants living in the country by 2030.
“These are the assessments made by the National Police regarding this phenomenon. Immigration experts knew from the outset, based on their investigations and intelligence work in this area, that the [illegal migrants in Spain] figures were significantly lower than the data they had obtained from other reports,” El Español wrote, and noted, “The statistics they [the police] rely on in this regard had already exceeded 800,000 by the beginning of the year.”
Spanish Immigration Laws state that once a migrant attains “legal” resident status in Spain, the person can then bring their spouse, children, minors, parents, or grandparents through “family reunification” procedures. The unnamed police officers stressed that this has particularly raised “alarms” among the Spanish police force, as “it won’t even be necessary for them to be actual relatives, it will be enough to claim that they are.”
The officers expressed their concerns that this will lead to “a business being set up where money is exchanged for those papers.”
“Time is of the essence,” the officers warned, reiterating that illegal migrants who become beneficiaries of amnesty will be able to “reunite” their families over the next years.
“They will be able to bring together and bring over parents, partners, and partners’ parents,” the officers added.
El Español emphasized that the Spanish government’s mass amnesty plan has created a “strong pull effect” attracting thousands of migrants from distant countries such as Pakistan and Turkey, as well as migrants settled in the Balkans.
Per the outlet, Spanish police officers reportedly warned throughout the start of 2026 that thousands of illegal migrants, “in many cases with criminal and police records” falsely claimed to authorities that they had “lost” their passports in an effort to obtain legal status in Spain.
“All the illegal migrants in Europe have come here. They had already passed through Spain on their way because they had come from those countries and had gone to the communities they had established in various parts of Europe, such as Afghans and Pakistanis in the United Kingdom, or Algerians and Moroccans in France and Belgium,” unnamed police officers told El Español.
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