The Government will approve this Tuesday in the Council of Ministers a new reform of the regulations of the Immigration Law that, in addition to simplifying the requirements required of foreigners to obtain residence and work permits, will exceptionally regularize asylum seekers whose request international protection has been denied and they are currently living without papers in Spain, as confirmed by government sources to elDiario.es. Given the increase in requests for international protection in recent years, it is expected that this temporary route will bring out of hiding tens of thousands of migrants who lost their papers due to the rejection of their application.
The reform aims to simplify the complex bureaucratic processes linked to residence and work permits, shorten the deadlines and reduce some of their requirements, which will facilitate the regularization of thousands of people also through the ordinary route. Among other changes, the new regulation reformulates the channels currently contemplated in the law so that people living in an irregular situation in Spain can obtain a temporary residence and work permit, which is known as the roots route.
One of the most notable developments is the reduction in the time that an undocumented migrant must have lived in Spain to be able to begin processing a residence permit based on “social roots.” A change is reduced from three to two years that, although it may seem minor, can benefit those people who arrived irregularly in Spain two years ago and who would no longer have to wait another year in hiding to request their authorization. The Ministry intends to “prioritize family ties with regular residents” and “make the accreditation of economic means more flexible.”
The figures previously known as “social roots” and “labor roots” merge into the new “socio-labor roots.” To request it, beneficiaries must present, as before, an offer of a work contract, although the minimum hours of this contract are reduced, from 30 to 20 hours per week. It will also allow several concatenated contracts to be presented for seasonal jobs to add up to the minimum hours required.
The text includes a new regularization route, called the “second chance root” that allows the regularization of people who had a residence permit in the two years prior to the application but could not renew it “for reasons other than public order, security or health”. For example, those people who missed the renewal deadline because they were on vacation outside of Spain. Therefore, this mechanism expands the scope of arraigo for cases of recent administrative irregularity, something that until now was barely contemplated.
At first, in the initial draft put out for public consultation in July, this figure also included a second assumption of beneficiaries: asylum seekers who, after having resided in the country regularly for a time, were left without papers due to receive a negative response to your request for protection.
However, this point has been modified after the suspicions shown within the Government during its processing and consultation with different ministries. The Interior Ministry has always warned of the alleged risk of “instrumentalization” of asylum requests as a way to obtain a residence permit. The result is the introduction of a transitional route that, although it will allow the regularization of thousands of people without major requirements, will not finally provide a stable route of access to papers for this group.
This transitional route will grant a temporary residence and work permit based on roots to those who are in an irregular situation at the time of the entry into force of the new regulation, provided that they register an asylum request and it is ultimately rejected. A previous draft of the rule established that it was only necessary to prove six months of residence in Spain, as El País announcedalthough this medium has not been able to confirm whether this period of stay is maintained as a requirement in the latest version of the text that will reach the Council of Ministers. In 2023 alone, 163,218 people requested international protection in Spain.
The reform of the regulations carried out in 2022 introduced the training roots, which allowed migrants in an irregular situation who have been living in Spain for two years access to a temporary residence permit, but not a work permit, with the aim of undergoing training that could open doors in sectors in need of labor. After finishing the course, beneficiaries could apply for a residence and work card if they obtained a job offer within the sector on which the course was based. However, thousands of people were unable to obtain this transfer from one authorization to another due to some deficiencies detected in the application of the mechanism.
With the new “socio-formative roots”, included in the regulations, the department led by Elma Sáiz says it seeks to correct the cracks identified during these two years. According to government sources, the changes will provide “more flexibility” in the accreditation of course enrollment. For example, if registration had an official deadline for its formalization, the application for socio-formative roots authorization must be submitted within the two months prior to the start of that deadline. Registration documentation may be accredited up to 3 months after the authorization is granted. The types of accepted training are also expanded, including basic levels and mandatory training for adults.
Family roots, expanded in the 2022 regulatory modification, are very limited in the new regulations. After having become one of the figures through which the most people were regularized last year, through the granting of residence to ascending and descending relatives with hardly any financial requirements, it is now limited to minors and people with disabilities. nationality of other countries of the EU, EEA or Switzerland.
The new regulations reserve the greatest scope of family reunification to the creation of a specific regime for foreigners who are relatives of those citizens with Spanish nationality. As explained in one of the drafts of the document, this figure, common in other community countries, did not exist in Spain, and in 2022 an attempt was made to regulate through family roots, expanding the assumptions that existed.
“However, this figure has encountered important limitations. Its exceptional nature and its own configuration as roots make it not possible to properly speak of a family member status for a complete Spanish citizen,” they explain in the drafts of the reform. For example, reunification for purposes of residence was not contemplated when the family member was in their country of origin or origin (since the possibility of applying for a visa was not contemplated), what happened if the family bond was broken or the possibility that the family member could regroup.
In the case of children, they may request such authorization up to the age of 26. The objective is, in addition to promoting family life, to facilitate “young people to integrate into our labor market.” Regarding the statute procedure, a distinction is made between those cases in which the Spanish citizen is in Spain and the family member is not, those in which both are outside and “the exceptional cases in which both could be within the national territory.”
The reform will also affect visas for job searches, whose terms will be lengthened in order to increase the time in which applicants can stay in Spain to find a job and apply for their residence permit, with less risk of falling into irregularity. supervening The regulatory change will also benefit foreign students, by making the transition from study permits to residence and work authorizations more flexible.
The regulatory change will be approved this Tuesday while the processing of a bill, promoted by civil society, continues for an extraordinary regularization with hardly any conditions for all people who reside in Spain irregularly. Although the Ministry of Inclusion positively values the debate on this initiative in Congress, they are committed to regulatory reforms such as the regulation because they consider it to be a “more stable” way to regularization and with more “legal certainty.”
However, the citizen movement Regularization Now insists on the need for widespread regularization without conditions, without linking it to the labor market, so that a humanitarian approach prevails over what they consider a “utilitarian” point of view with which they fear that ended up leaving “many people behind.”
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