MORE than 400,000 applications for Spain’s record-breaking migrant regularisation scheme are at risk of being fraudulent, a report claims.
Border police said they uncovered an online black market where migrant-smuggling mafias sold fake documents to would-be applicants, allowing them to claim they were living in Spain when in fact they were not.
According to a report by the General Directorate for Immigration and Borders (CGEF), about a quarter of the programme’s 1.2 million regularisation requests came from people who did not ‘reside in the country ,’ in what police unions described as a ‘massive fraud.’
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Laura Garcia, a spokesperson for JUPOL, told broadcaster Onda Cero: “[This could be] a massive fraud, because [certain applicants] do not meet the scheme’s requirements.”
She added: “What was already going to be a porous system is now going to become an express lane [for regularisation].”
The scheme, which closed on June 30, was aimed at granting legal status to thousands of undocumented migrants living and working in Spain.
Successful applicants are set to receive one-year residence and work permits, which can be renewed if they continue to meet Spain’s immigration requirements.
The scheme was open to anyone without any prior criminal convictions who could show they had lived in Spain for at least five months before January 1 this year.
Garcia, however, is now warning that migrant-smuggling mafias had a ‘field day’ with the programme.
According to the CGEF report, the groups advertised the sale of their fake documents – including phone and gas bills – on Instagram and Telegram.
It remains unknown how many people allegedly purchased the forged documents in a bid to qualify for the scheme.
According to a report by El Español, however, police had also warned earlier this year that ‘thousands of applicants’ with previous criminal convictions were falsely claiming they had lost their passports to avoid being identified as convicted criminals.
Since the regularisation was announced in January, reports of lost passports among Pakistanis in Spain have risen by a staggering 866%, police said.
The figures also soared for Algerians (356%), Moroccans (114%) and Colombians (35%).
The development threatens to fuel further controversy over the scheme after it attracted more than double the 500,000 applications initially estimated by the government.
Sources told El Español that, according to police estimates, around 850,000 undocumented migrants were living in Spain before January 1.
Police argue this means that any application beyond that number would have come from someone who did not meet the requirement of having lived in Spain for at least five months before January 1.
Applying to the programme, however, does not automatically mean a migrant will receive a residence and work permit.
A regularisation application is only successful if applicants meet all the necessary requirements and pass administrative checks, according to Spain’s Ministry of Inclusion.
In early July, the Ministry said it had approved around 600,000 applications for processing.
Authorities had previously said they would only be able to process around 750,000 applications in total.
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