Is there any evidence to suggest that Spain’s current mass regularisation of migrants will act as a pull factor for more undocumented to enter the country in the months to come?
Spain’s controversial migrant amnesty was approved by the government in April and gained international headlines for offering residence and work permits to undocumented migrants who were already living in Spain before January 1st, 2026.
Applicants meeting the requirements – such as continuously residing in Spain for at least five months prior to the date of application and having a clear criminal record – will see them granted an initial one-year residency and employment permit.
The deadline for the amnesty is set for June 30th 2026.
Q&A: How Spain’s mass regularisation of undocumented migrants will work
According to the latest data available, 86 percent of those applying are from Latin America.
But that hasn’t stopped the Spanish right in both politics and the press from spreading misinformation about the measure.
You can read The Local’s myth buster here or linked below, but the main takeaways are: no, this won’t mainly benefit Africans arriving in Spain on boats, and undocumented migrants won’t be given citizenship and voting rights or gain EU freedom of movement rights.
Another claim repeated as fact in the debate is that the amnesty will create a ‘pull factor’ — known as efecto llamada in Spanish — that will draw more migrants to Spain.
Up to 400,000 extra migrants have applied for the mass regularisation than initially forecast, allaying fears that it incentivises irregular migration flows.
However, studies show us that there is no evidence of previous migrant amnesties, including by the Spanish right in the past, such right-wing Prime Minister José María Aznar, who in 2000 and 2001 allowed 503,000 migrants to regularise their situation, creating a pull factor.
Spain has already had regularisation programmes: three approved under the Socialist Felipe González government in 1986, 1991 and 1996; two under the Aznar centre-right Popular Party (PP) in 2000 and 2001; and one under leftist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in 2005.
Following the regularisations of 2000 and 2001, figures show the number of foreign arrivals fluctuated, rising very slightly, before falling.
A study by Larramona and Sanso-Navarro published in 2016 analysed the Zapatero amnesty in which it created a ‘comparable Spain’ based on a weighted combination of other similar countries that did not carry out regularisation. If regularisation had a pull effect, Spain should’ve diverged from those countries from 2005 onwards.
However, the study found no clear spike in the number of migrant arrivals marking a before-and-after point caused by the policy.
Another more recent study, this time from 2025, by Elias, Monras and Vázquez-Grenno, examined population using municipal registers, something that often includes migrants in illegal situations.
The study tested if there had been an increase in irregular arrivals driven by the expectation of easily obtaining legal status, something observable in municipal data.
But their analysis found no evidence that more people arrived ‘attracted’ by the measure or were pulled in by the regularisation process.
Similarly, a 2015 study from the University of Zaragoza concluded that regularisation “had no significant effect on the percentage of the foreign population in Spain” and that economics, if anything, provides more of a pull factor.
Summing up the thrust of these studies, Yoan Molinero Gerbeau from the Instituto Universitario de Estudios sobre Migraciones, writes that: “In short, in the face of the alarmism surrounding the so-called ‘pull factor’, the available evidence suggests the opposite: regularisations do not, in themselves, lead to an automatic increase in new arrivals.
“What they do bring about is a reduction in irregular migration and, consequently, in the vulnerability associated with it, as well as having positive effects on formal employment and tax revenue.”
In the case of this 2026 regularisation, critics claim it will have a pull factor or ‘call effect’ that will entice more immigrants to enter Spain illegally but the rules of the regularisation itself make this impossible.
Put simply, arriving now on the back of the migrant amnesty would be pointless as one of the key requirements is to have arrived in Spain before December 31st 2025 and be able to prove it, meaning that those who enter after the date would not be eligible for the current amnesty.
In short: this regularisation is offered for a short period of time to migrants who can prove they are already living in Spain.
However, it cannot be denied that Spain’s foreign population is forecast to keep growing at a similar pace as in the last years, and that irregular migration will still exist.
Q1 2026 data from Spain’s National Statistics Institute suggests that Spain’s positive net migration this year will follow the same trend as it has in recent years: 727,005 in 2022, 642,296 in 2023 and 626,268 in 2024.
Knowing how many new undocumented migrants will be in Spain this year is impossible due to their unregistered status.
An article by right-leaning Spanish newspaper El Confidencial which analysed recent immigration data claimed there could be as many as 700,000 new undocumented people in Spain by the end 2026, but this has not been echoed by any other reliable source.
