The administration of Spanish socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is expecting to receive as many as 750,000 applications from illegal migrants seeking to become beneficiaries of Sánchez’s mass amnesty plans, the newspaper El País reported on Thursday.
The Spanish government is presently working towards finalizing a decree announced by Sánchez in January that, once implemented will grant legal residence permits to 500,000 illegal migrants in Spain — requesting only that they comply with a list of notably lax requirements.
Despite a fierce rejection from Spanish nationals and the nation’s Congress, Sánchez intends to implement the highly controversial plan through a Royal Decree, which allows him to bypass parliamentary approval requirements for its execution.
El Pais reports that it has reviewed documentation from the Spanish Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration in which the office stated that it is expecting to receive 750,000 requests for the mass amnesty plan, 50 percent more than the 500,000 cap.
The newspaper described the Ministry documentation as a “kind of operational manual” outlining the technological and human resources needed to manage the mass amnesty’s administrative process.
Of the total half a million, the newspaper detailed, 300,000 will be granted through a channel designated for those who have applied for international protection and who entered Spain before January 1, 2026. The remaining 200,000 will be granted to foreigners who also arrived before that date and can prove that they have been continuously present in Spain for five months at the time of filing their application.
According to El País, the Spanish government is also expecting to reject “more than 30 percent” of all applications.
“The scale of the operation […] will have to handle a number of applications and files that exceeds the estimated number of potential beneficiaries,” the Ministry documentation reportedly read.
According to the Ministry guidelines, individuals who are already in the process of obtaining a residence and work permit in Spain are excluded from the mass regularization decree — which reportedly amounts to a total of “180,000 cases of residency permits pending resolution as of December 31, 2025.”
The Ministry’s policy, El País explained, aims to to avoid creating a “situation of comparative disadvantage for asylum seekers whose applications will be accepted even if they have pending proceedings.”
“The document states that these cases will be automatically resolved in their favor through a ‘fast-track’ process for priority processing, provided they ‘have no criminal record and do not pose a threat to public order, safety, or health,” El País reported, adding that the same procedure will apply to those applying for a residence permit due to “exceptional circumstances.”
El País detailed that the mass amnesty decree is currently under review by the Spanish Council of State and is expected to be approved this month. Unnamed sources claimed to the newspaper that it will be approved by the Council of Ministers on April 21 for publication in the Official State Gazette, but “not everyone is convinced that date is accurate.”
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