In April 2026, Spain launched a new regularisation programme for undocumented migrants, which is estimated to benefit more than 500,000 people. At the end of 2025, Germany concluded a regularisation campaign launched in 2023, for which more than 80,000 people applied. These recent examples to which we could add the Italian and Portuguese regularisation campaigns during the Covid-19 pandemic – show us that this type of campaign is by no means exceptional. As the research argues, these campaigns are, in fact, an integral part of European migration policies and provide a response to situations of irregularity caused by employers’ demand for labour, migrants’ aspirations to reach Europe, and the limited number of legal channels available to do so.
Although they are frequent, these campaigns nonetheless provoke strong reactions in the political sphere, where the issue of migration – and irregular migration, in particular – is the subject of highly polarised debates. This is particularly the case in Belgium; but also in France, where Bruno Retailleau – Les Républicains party candidate in the upcoming presidential election – recently proposed to “banish Spain from Europe”, on the grounds that its latest regularisation campaign runs counter to what Europeans want.
