Spain’s Immigration Policies: No ‘Numbers Versus Rights’

Since the early 1990s, after a brief initial period presided over by a highly restrictive legal framework in the second half of the 1980s - guided more by the wish to appease the fears of its European neighbours in the wake of its accession to the European Union - Spain’s immigration policies have tended to become more open and inclusive. Early actions to relax the restrictive legal framework included in 1993 the adoption of the contingente, a pioneering scheme which aimed to facilitate the legal access to the labour market of foreign workers. A more mature and ambitious reform took place in 2004-2005 which aimed to reduce irregular migration and  to facilitate the satisfaction of the employers’ demand for labour. And this took place in the midst of a major immigration boom which quintupled the number of immigrants in less than a decade. All in all, it can be said that immigration policy in Spain has not been primarily concerned with numbers but rather with making labour immigration legal - through widening admission channels, regularization processes, and efforts to improve the control of entries and stays of unauthorized foreigners – and with enlarging immigrants’ rights.