Minister rebuffs proposed blanket amnesty for migrants

Red Cross team rescuing migrants arriving to Spain by boat in Mediterranean. Photo: Europa Press
Share now:

The Minister of Social Security, Inclusion and Migration, José Luis Escrivá, has defended a case-by-case analysis of the situation of each migrant who arrives to Spain, saying the government will not endorse a general and massive regularization of all those who arrive without proper documentation to Spain.

Escrivá’s comments were made during a Plenary session of Spain’s Senate on Tuesday, less than one week after United Podemos, the junior partner in Spain’s coalition government, presented a proposal to Congress to regularize all foreigners who were already in Spain when the state of alarm was decreed.

Unidas Podemos calculates that between immigrants without proper residence papers and asylum seekers awaiting the resolution of their case files there are nearly 600,000 foreigners awaiting definitive documentation to reside in Spain. As part of the same proposal, Unidas Podemos wants to give Spanish nationality to any migrant who collaborated in providing front-line “essential” services during the coronavirus health emergency.

► News Sources: Europa Press, El País and EP/Teleprensa …

But Escrivá made it clear Tuesday that the Socialist party of President Pedro Sánchez is not budging from its current case-by-case policy of processing migrants who arrive in the country without documentation. This, he said, is in keeping with the model for dealing with undocumented migrants that is established by the European framework on migration and refugees.

“This is the framework in which we operate,” he told Spain’s Senate on Tuesday, “case by case, at the individual level.”

Spain experienced a slight increase of 8 percent in the month of June in terms of irregular arrivals of migrants to the country, for a monthly total of 750 migrants crossing its borders without legal documentation.

According to the European border agency Frontex, a total of 4,451 migrants arrived in Spain in the first six months of the year via the Western Mediterranean route, representing a 56 percent drop in efforts to reach Spain’s southern coastline by boat across the Western Mediterranean.

► Click to read more news about Refugees & Migration to Spain …

Check out more news from Spain about:
Animal WelfareCorruption/TransparencyDiscriminationEconomyEducationElectionsEnvironment & Sustainability Fair Trade & Development AidHealthcareHistorical MemoryHousing & HomelessnessHuman RightsLabour & Unemployment LGBT+ PoliticsPoverty Refugees & Migration Technology & Social EnterpriseWar & Peace Women’s Rights

Creative Commons License
All images at ProgressiveSpain.com are the copyright of their respective authors/owners and are reproduced here for non-commercial, journalistic purposes in accordance with Fair Use doctrine. All other content is Copyright © 2015-2020 ProgressiveSpain.com and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Share now: