The extraordinary regularization of immigrants that the Government is now promoting does not come out of nowhere nor does it respond solely to an administrative contingency. For years, the Spanish Episcopal Conference has been publicly supporting a broad regularization of foreigners in an irregular situation. In April 2024, the CEE Information Office disseminated a statement in which various “Church entities” requested that the parliamentary groups of Congress take into consideration the Popular Legislative Initiative for the extraordinary regularization of foreign persons. Among the signatory organizations were Cáritas, the Spanish Conference of Religious, and various networks of church-inspired NGOs. The ILP had been registered after surpassing the legal threshold of 500,000 signatures and proposed the regularization of a volume of people that various estimates place between 400,000 and 500,000 immigrants.
This support has not been discreet or punctual, but repeated and documented, through official statements and public positions. Therefore, it is not a matter of the Government strictly following the “lead” of the Church, something hardly sustainable, but rather that certain ecclesial approaches now converge with very specific political interests.
The political convergence: Government, Podemos and CEE
The coincidence of interests is striking. Podemos has systematically defended mass regularization as an ideological banner, linking it to a discourse of rights with hardly any reference to limits or consequences. The Government, for its part, presents the measure as a humanitarian and economic response, emphasizing the supposed need for labor in certain productive sectors. The Church, or at least its most visible instances, provides moral support, framing the initiative in a language of welcome and Christian charity.
The motivations are not identical, but the practical result is the same: an objective alignment between the Executive, the radical left, and the Episcopal Conference around a policy of enormous structural impact. This convergence occurs, moreover, at a particularly opportune political moment for the Government.
The smokescreen while essential services fail
The acceleration of the migration debate coincides with a growing management crisis in key areas of the State. The deterioration of the railway network, with breakdowns, massive delays, and episodes of collapse affecting thousands of citizens, has become a visible symbol of the degradation of essential public services. In this context, the extraordinary regularization functions as an effective political smokescreen: it shifts the media focus to an emotionally sensitive terrain and allows the Executive to take refuge in a humanitarian discourse in the face of very specific criticisms of its management.
It is no coincidence that the debate is framed in absolute moral terms, where any objection can be presented as a lack of humanity, while issues of infrastructure, planning, and political responsibility fade into the background.
Social data that do not fit the narrative
The data, however, introduce uncomfortable nuances. Spain closed 2023 with more than 2.7 million foreign affiliates to Social Security, a record figure, and at the same time maintains one of the highest unemployment rates in the European Union, especially among young people and low-skilled workers. According to the INE, access to housing has deteriorated significantly in large cities and areas with high migratory pressure, with price increases that directly affect the lowest incomes. Reports from the Bank of Spain have warned that the impact of immigration depends on its volume, its pace, and the real capacity for integration, factors that cannot be ignored without social consequences.
Those who bear these effects are not the political elites or the institutional environments that formulate the discourses, but the popular classes, who suffer from the precariousness of employment, downward wage competition, saturation of services, and the deterioration of everyday coexistence.
Personal charity and social responsibility: two distinct planes
Here emerges the underlying confusion. Christian charity toward the concrete, vulnerable, and needy immigrant belongs to the personal and pastoral realm and admits no moral discussion. It is a charity of proximity, immediate and human. But transferring that logic without nuances to the design of large-scale public policies is another matter. The Church’s Social Doctrine has never detached charity from the common good, social order, and justice, nor has it identified compassion with the absence of limits.
A charity that does not take into account the balance of societies ends up being unjust, even if it is expressed in pious language. Confusing both planes not only impoverishes the public debate but also compromises the moral credibility of the Church, which runs the risk of appearing as just another actor within a political strategy oblivious to the real consequences.
The real cost of an uncomfortable convergence
While the trains do not arrive, infrastructures deteriorate, and precariousness spreads, the migration debate returns to occupy the center of the stage, cloaked in good intentions and transversal consensuses. The convergence between the Government, Podemos, and the Episcopal Conference raises an uncomfortable question that is hardly posed: who assumes the social, economic, and cultural costs of these decisions and why do they always fall on the same people.