On 30 June, Spain closed the window for the extraordinary regularisation championed by the Sánchez government: 1,174,978 applications filed, more than double the 500,000 initially estimated. It's Spain's seventh regularisation since 1986; three were launched under Aznar's conservative government. Right now, though, the measure has come under fire from 22 European countries led by Meloni and Frederiksen, who point to it as a possible "pull factor" behind the Ceuta crisis. Sánchez has rejected the accusation: the regularisation applies only to people already in Spain before 1 January 2026, grants no citizenship, no vote, no freedom of movement beyond a tourist visa, and the young people who arrived at Ceuta never cited it as their reason for leaving. "When we condemn a person to invisibility, we make our country worse. We all lose," he said when presenting the measure, adding that without immigration Spain would lose 19% of its GDP by 2050 and 22% by 2075.

Who applied: 67% of applications come from Latin America. The rest splits between Africa (22.9%, with Morocco at 13.3-13.4%, the second largest nationality after Colombia) and Asia (8.3%). Latin Americans, under long-standing agreements, can access citizenship after just two years of legal residence.

What has worked, and what the comparison with Italy shows: Results are already measurable: by 2 July, 609,737 applications had been processed. In May, Spain recorded a historic high of 3.36 million foreign workers registered with social security. The government estimates a net fiscal benefit of €3,300-4,000 a year per regularised person. According to the Funcas Foundation, the entry of foreign labour explains 47% (4.2 points) of Spain's cumulative GDP growth since 2022, which reached 2.8% in 2025 (final INE figure), double the Eurozone average (1.4%), after 3.2% in 2024; a quarter of all new jobs created in the EU since 2020 were created in Spain.

Italy, for its part, can present itself neither as an alternative model nor as a country untouched by this practice: the largest regularisation in its history, over 634,000 people, was decided by the Berlusconi government in 2002. The more recent precedent, the 2020 "Emersione di rapporti di lavoro" (Article 103 of the Relaunch Decree, under the Conte II government, championed by Agriculture Minister Teresa Bellanova), shared the same goal but was managed far less effectively than in Spain, which, in both 2005 and 2026, paired regularisation with parallel and limited but real investment in healthcare, social housing and staff. Italy instead handed the process to local prefectures without adequately reinforcing them. The result: ActionAid, Asgi, Oxfam, Cild and other advocacy groups had to bring a class action, the first ever accepted in Italy on immigration grounds, and the Council of State issued two final rulings (no. 7704/2024 and no. 1596/2025) condemning the Interior Ministry for "serious and systemic inefficiency."

The wall against reality: Europe needs these workers: While 22 European leaders sign letters against regularisation, 63% of European small and medium businesses say they cannot find the skills they need, and the Commission has identified 42 professions facing structural shortages across every member state. Denying this reality, more than immigration itself, is the real political problem. In Italy, the so-called ”Decreto Flussi is not a regularisation: it governs new labour entries through quotas, not people already present irregularly. It's the tool Italy says it prefers yet it works far worse: in 2025, of the 181,450 people planned under the quota system, only 7.9% translated into an actual residence permit. The problem is far from solved: just this July, Italian businesses were looking for over 568,000 workers and couldn't find nearly half of them (Unioncamere). Regularisation is rejected in the name of rigour, but the legal alternative doesn't work either. And there's also an almost comic paradox: part of Italy's anxiety about Spain's regularisation seems to assume the newly regularised might move on to Italy. The data says the opposite: in 2025 Spain became the single most popular destination for people, mostly young and educated, leaving Italy, overtaking Germany.

The absurdity of return centres that do not return much. And people continue to die: The stated alternative to regularisation is expulsion of those without the right to stay. Italy's detention centres for returns (CPRs) show how illusory that is: in 2023 only 10% of foreigners under expulsion orders were actually returned, and between 2011 and 2023 that share never exceeded 32%. The bigger picture confirms the failure: between 2023 and 2025 Spain carried out 17,805 returns against Italy's 12,535, 29.6% fewer, despite Italy's irregular arrivals being double Spain's over the same period (Eurostat, cited by Il Fatto Quotidiano, 1 August 2026). Also, fewer crossings haven't meant a safer journey: in 2026 arrivals to Europe fell across nearly every route, yet deaths at sea more than doubled, passing 1,200 confirmed victims by May alone, according to the IOM, the worst toll since systematic monitoring began in 2014. To which we need to add the more than hundred dead in the sea off Ceuta and the 17 more migrants found dead off the Balearic Islands, adrift for two weeks on a boat that had left North Africa with 19 people aboard and only two survived. In short, the hard line doesn't necessarily produce more returns and less deaths.

In Italy there are 11 centres, their managment is very expensive and often very inefficient,  and a 2026 report from the Asylum and Immigration Table described them as "total institutions" (Erving Goffman's concept): thousands of people are held for months doing nothing, in a system whose only answer is repression and exclusion, often with a large use of psycotic drugs, while Italy has simultaneously cut funding for integrating those already here: the 2023 budget law slashed reception funding by €250 million (2023), €600 million (2024) and €750 million (2025), and the Cutro Decree specifically hit Italian language courses. It is the most glaring waste, human as much as financial, in Italy's migration system, the exact opposite of what Spain is trying to do.

The Albania model, and the plan to export it across the Union: The Meloni government has again proposed to Tuesday 4 August's Interior Min uisters Council that the "Albania model" be expanded across the continent: new return hubs, mostly in Africa, funded by EU money; and Commissioner Brunner has said he wouldn't be opposed to financing them with European funds. Yet the original model is already a costly, declared failure: €120 million a year, €600 million in total through 2028, for facilities that cost €3 million and €20 million to build (Shengjin and Gjader) and remain nearly empty, against a promised capacity of 36,000 migrants a year, only 527 had passed through by April 2026. Giorgia Meloni is counting on the new EU return regulation, approved by Parliament to overcome the legal blocks she says have held the model back. But the courts grounded their rulings in fundamental-rights principles, not procedural gaps: hard to override those. And Albania itself won't renew the deal past 2030. It is a model that doesn't work, is legally fragile and extremely costly and isn't winning many converts: only six member states are even studying the idea.

Why doing regularisation properly improves security: Italy today has an estimated 200,000 irregular agricultural workers, nearly a third of the sector's workforce, according to the Placido Rizzotto Observatory. Irregularity in domestic work reaches 51.8%. A significant share of this irregularity doesn't stem from a wish to dodge the rules, but from a slow, tangled public bureaucracy: permits that expire before they can be renewed, cases that drag on for years, a process that exhausts those who go through it honestly. The case of Satnam Singh, the Indian farmworker left to bleed to death in 2024 because he was undocumented and therefore invisible to the system, remains the starkest example: exploitation feeds precisely on this illegality, often produced by the state itself, which has no interest in preventing it because it draws political advantage from it. But undocumented people don't disappear when the state refuses to regularise them: they stay, they work, but they're left exposed to blackmail. This is exactly what Spain is trying to fix.

What hasn't worked in Spain, and what remains critical today: In the first weeks the administrative machine struggled: queues, delays in social security numbers, consular backlogs. That phase has more or less normalised, but two issues remain open: the possible multiplier effect of family reunifications, flagged by National Police leadership; and the territorial distribution of costs, with contribution revenue going to central government while the costs for schools and housing fall on regional governments, increasingly run by the conservative Partido Popular in alliance with Vox, a political polarisation that makes cooperation with central government difficult. Serious management difficulties, which need addressing, but they don't undermine the principle.

A bitter conclusion remains. Last week in Ceuta, more than a hundred people died, and thousands more threw themselves into a hopeless escape, in a surge that everything suggests that there was some orchestration or at least “laissez-faire” by Morocco and amplified on social media. That tragedy was turned into a manufactured emergency for Europe no real risk, the Commission itself admits, used to reinforce the very idea that Spain's regularisation had tried to disprove: that the only answer is to close up. The interior Ministers summit on the 4th of August avoided an open clash between Rome and Madrid, but discussed no alternative to Fortress Europe, quite the opposite; and Italy's own Schengen suspension, targeting a threat that never existed, its most absurd contribution (one can only hope Meloni reconsiders it). With elections approaching in Italy, Germany, Spain, France and Poland, there's little doubt the right already has the advantage on this issue, and Ceuta has certainly helped it along. Yet regularising and integrating, within an effective and humane framework of border control, brings clear economic and social benefits  and remains, too, the condition for not being left exposed to blackmail by those who want a weak, divided Europe: and that, alongside the ecological transition, will be the real battle for the progressive, ecologist and pro-European front.