Children play near a mural in the largely Latino neighbourhood of Oporto in Madrid. Photo / Michael Robinson Chávez, for the Washington Post
MADRID - When night falls on the other side of the Atlantic, Edith Chimbo’s 32-year-old cousin, a house cleaner in New York, huddles inside a dim basement apartment, terrified of ICE raids.
In a burgeoning quarter of the Spanish capital, where immigrant-staffed restaurants tempt newcomers with Dominican chicharrones and Venezuelan empanadas, Chimbo sat in the sunlight, musing about the Spanish Dream.
“My cousin told me, ‘Go to Spain,’” said Chimbo, 22, who landed in Madrid earlier this year from the Ecuadorian highlands.
Armed with a university degree but no work permit, she’s cleaning houses under the table, just like her cousin in the United States. Yet she is counting on something in the weeks ahead that her kin almost certainly cannot: legalisation.
“Here,” she said, “we have hope.”
As the Trump Administration’s crackdown on immigrants and asylum seekers brings tear gas, protests and raids to the streets of the US, Spain is positioning itself as a counterpoint: a new land of opportunity.
In this nation of 48 million with long colonial links to the New World, an influx of predominantly Latin American immigrants is helping to fuel one of the fastest-growing economies in Europe.
The Spanish economic transformation is unfolding as the centre-left Government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has streamlined immigration rules while offering legal status to roughly 700,000 irregular migrants since 2021.
A landmark bill now being negotiated in the Congress of Deputies could grant legal amnesty to hundreds of thousands more - most of them Spanish-speakers from predominantly Catholic countries in Latin America.
Those newcomers often enjoy visa-free travel to Spain, even as Madrid controversially works with Morocco, Mauritania and other countries to block irregular arrivals from the African coast, though Sánchez has also called for tolerance towards migrants fleeing poverty and violence in Africa.
Spain’s approach is attracting at least some migrants rejected or barred from the US, including Venezuelans who are now subject to US President Donald Trump’s travel ban.
The number of Venezuelans applying for humanitarian protection in Spain surged to 36,923 between January and May, a 36.4% spike from the same period last year.
With no visa requirements, all Venezuelans need is a valid passport and a plane ticket. In May, the most recent period available, applicants enjoyed a 98.6% acceptance rate.
“My hopes and plans for the US ended overnight,” said Alexander Salazar, 34, a Venezuelan living in Peru who found out in February that his US visa, on humanitarian grounds as an LGBTQ+ migrant, had been suspended.
His plan now is to join other family and friends who have already left for Spain.
“That’s where my road leads,” he said by telephone from Lima.
Sira Rego, a minister in Sánchez’s Government, said she was glad to see immigrants choosing Spain.
“It makes me feel a certain pride because it represents the kind of country we want to build: a welcoming country with rights.”
Sánchez now finds his party embroiled in a political corruption scandal that has sparked calls for new elections.
Still, Spanish lawmakers across the political spectrum have adopted a less demonising approach towards immigration - at least from some countries - than many of their American and European counterparts.
Even the far-right Vox Party has appeared moderately welcoming of some Spanish-speaking, culturally similar immigrants from Latin America.
Spain, which like most European countries has an ageing population, for decades was more a source of outward emigration than a destination for immigrants.
It first emerged as a tempting target for foreign job seekers during its economic boom in 2000s.
More recently, it has experienced a historic post-pandemic surge, with 2.67 million people born outside the European Union arriving between 2021 and 2023 - an 85% increase compared with the previous three-year period.
Many of its immigrants, particularly from Latin America, arrive legally, either with work or student permits or as tourists, and later seek to change their status.
Yet the country still harbours a hidden mass of migrants without legal permission to work.
The Government has no official figure of how many could be legalised under the new bill, but estimates suggest anywhere from 600,000 to one million.
Critics point to Spain’s unemployment rate - over 10% , the highest in the European Union, though less than half what it was a decade ago - as evidence that welcoming migrants is wrongheaded.
They argue it suppresses wage growth, increases competition for Spanish workers, and threatens Spanish identity. Some opinion polls also show a hardening public stance on migration.
Yet the legislative amnesty push came not from a government plan, but a grassroots effort backed by civil actors including small-town mayors, companies, migrant advocates, and the Catholic church.
Spain also has a history of normalising irregular migrants who can prove steady work, with the last large-scale amnesty under the centre-left government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in 2005.
Should Sánchez survive the corruption crisis - and Spain’s economy continue to thrive - his policies could set up this nation as the antithesis of Trump’s America: a migrant-friendly progressive paradise.
Under Sánchez, Spain has leaned in as few other nations to diversity, equity and inclusion.
A new government rule effective since May 1 compels companies with more than 50 employees to enact antidiscrimination policies protecting LGBTQ+ workers.
The Government is also forging a close economic relationship with Beijing, generating large-scale investment including Chinese auto giant Chery’s first factory in Europe.
No policy has been as transformative to Spanish society as the stance on immigration, which officials and economists say is helping to reverse population decline and boost social welfare funding at a moment when baby boomers are retiring.
Immigration is also helping drive the strongest period of economic growth since Spain’s construction boom in the mid-2000s.
Between 2022 and 2024, average GDP per capita increased 2.9% - the strongest of the EU’s four largest economies.
A report published this year by the Bank of Spain estimates that up to 25% of that growth was linked to the influx of foreign workers paying taxes, filling jobs, renting homes, and purchasing goods and services.
“Spain is a complete anomaly, a country where the Government is easing the arrival of migrants, and migrants have been absolutely existential to the dynamism of the economy,” said Gonzalo Fanjul, co-founder at porCausa Foundation, a research group on migrant issues.
Experts and officials say the arrival of large numbers of Latin American immigrants, who speak Spanish and are overwhelmingly Catholic, has led to fewer societal divisions over assimilation than in countries like Sweden or Germany, which have experienced a large influx of Muslims.
“I really doubt that there is any other country in the world where migration is playing as much a role in economic growth right now as it is in Spain,” said Juan Cerruti, an Argentine émigré to Spain and now the global chief economist at Madrid-based Banco Santander.
Immigrants are filling labour gaps not only in Spain’s lower-wage tourism, construction and agricultural sectors, but also in the more highly skilled tech and medical sectors.
In an office park on the edge of Valencia, companies such as Avantio, a digital services and software provider for the tourism industry, have leveraged Spain’s streamlined immigration rules to employ foreigners and grow business.
Company officials say they have turned to foreign labour for positions that otherwise might take up to a year to fill. Almost 73% of the company’s hires in 2024 were born outside Spain, mostly in Latin America.
“We hire people from outside because we need them, we don’t differentiate” based on where they are from, said Rebeca Jorge, Avantio’s director of human resources.
Spain has also changed its rules to help legalise the status of migrants with proof of long-term work, to ease access to work visas for new immigrants, to loosen work restrictions on student visa-holders and to simplify family reunification rules.
Those simplified rules could aide Chimbo, whose mother immigrated from Ecuador to Spain a decade ago and became a citizen.
Chimbo arrived on a three-month visa in April and is now applying for long-term legal status and the right to work through family reunification. She said she is confident that if that fails, the amnesty legislation could aid her.
Before arriving, she considered following her cousin to the US - a path Chimbo’s father tried before being detained and deported from Texas last year.
Speaking on a video phone from her dark basement apartment in a New York City suburb, her cousin Cristina said she warned Chimbo away from the US.
“I’m afraid all the time now … whenever I’m outside, taking the bus to work … I’m afraid,” said Cristina, who is trying to apply for asylum but frets about her chances.
“I’ve seen the videos. I’ve seen what they’re doing to migrants in the US,” Chimbo said. “Here, my biggest fear is Mondays, when I have to go to work.”
In the orange blossom-tinged air of Valencia, men from Colombia, Ecuador, Morocco, Senegal and a host of other countries laboured on crews rebuilding infrastructure and erecting new apartments following the devastating floods that hit the region in October.
This year, Spain offered legal status to more than 22,000 irregular migrants in the affected area - helping populate an army of construction workers and filling other key jobs in the rebuilding effort.
It was a decision driven by humanitarian concern for migrants unable to access government aid following the disaster. But it was also driven by pragmatism.
“I asked the Spanish Government for this,” said José Vicente Morata, president of the Valencia Chamber of Commerce.
“We needed these people to have an identification number, the number to be able to exist in Spain. There was a bottleneck in the procedures, [and] we needed workers.”
The region has now evolved into a mini-test case of Spain’s legalisation efforts.
After the floods, Gerardo López Mateu, Mayor of the nearby village of Real, struggled to find workers willing to work in the town’s ongoing clean-up effort. He had four positions open - three of them are now filled by migrants.
“We still can’t fill the fourth job,” he said. There are some jobs that “Spaniards just don’t want to do”.
One of his workers is Ibra Bayane, a 24-year-old Senegalese who arrived in Spain by sea in 2021, living ever since off the precariously shadow economy.
He’d pick oranges or deliver food. At best, he said, he’d earn the equivalent of US$35 a day.
As a documented migrant, he has been able to get a driver’s licence for the first time and access basic medical care.
Now, he can also travel back to Senegal to visit family without risk. His salary is no fortune - €60 ($116) a day for clean-up work in the hot southern Spanish sun.
But it’s twice what he was earning before - and enough to afford a small room with a vase of fresh flowers on a desk, and a large window that brings a cooling breeze.
“My life is better now,” he said. “I can live.”
- José Bautista contributed to this report.
Iran has vowed to respond, claiming its enriched uranium wasn’t destroyed.