How Spain’s amnesty on unlawful migrants may unleash an inflow to Britain… and the backlash has already begun. Special report by SUE REID

Habib Hassaine is standing in a line of 400 jostling people snaking along a narrow street named Pintor Velazquez in Alicante. It is 8am as they head towards the doors of the Algerian consulate, buried between halal butchers’ shops and money transfer booths, where officials wait to greet them.

Some men in the queue have slept overnight on shabby mattresses, which lie discarded on the pavement as they begin the process leading to a new life in socialist-run Spain – and an official foothold in Europe.

As the Spaniards on the street come out of their apartments to go to work, they take one look at the Algerian contingent – the few women among them in hijabs – shake their heads and roll their eyes.

Yet Habib, a dark-haired, polite 23-year-old marketing student from Algiers, is excited. He takes out his mobile phone to write me a message he translates into English.

‘I came here on a death boat,’ he writes simply of his illegal journey to a Spanish beach on a traffickers’ vessel with 60 others last year. ‘I have no work. I have no money. Now I have been given by Spain a chance for myself.’

Ominously, the Algerians queuing with him are being scrutinised by stern-looking Spanish armed police who are looking out for criminals’ faces and taking copious photographs.

Two men were arrested in the consulate line last week: swooped on, put in handcuffs then driven away in a dark blue van of the Policia Nacional for questioning about suspected robberies in Spain.

Habib and the other Algerians, all chattering in Arabic, are at their consulate to apply for a document declaring they have no criminal record back home in Algeria. Once they get that piece of paper, they will be free to apply for Spanish residency under a controversial amnesty for 837,000 illegal and undocumented foreigners, who have been in Spain for at least five months before January 1, as announced by Spain’s hard-Left prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, two weeks ago.

The Sanchez offer – pushed through abruptly by royal decree – aims to solve a shortage of workers, boost the economy and make Spain a happy place to live for everyone, whatever their ethnicity.

‘It is a historic day for our country,’ said Elma Saiz, the minister for migration, addressing an undoubtedly perturbed Spanish population. For not everyone sees it like the socialists, of course.

Spain received a record 63,000 illegal migrants in 2024, many arriving at the Spanish-owned Balearic Islands by sea, but also significant numbers on traffickers’ boats coming to the mainland from Algeria’s coastal cities more than 140 miles away.

Some of the newcomers hail from Spanish-speaking Latin American nations, such as Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. In Alicante, almost a third of the population is now foreign-born, with Algerians making up the biggest contingent.

The offer of official residency could also prove an unexpected boon to thousands of expat Britons living in Spain ‘under the radar’.

More than 300,000 are registered to live in Spain, but many thousands more have been living here without proper residency – and working illegally – since Brexit, and are likely to seize the opportunity to sign up.

The controversial amnesty, announced unilaterally by Sanchez, is provoking a backlash from Right-wing politicians in Spain.

Alberto Nunez Feijoo, president of Spain’s rising conservative People’s Party (PP) said it was a reward by socialists for ‘illegality’ and destined to overwhelm schools, hospitals and the welfare system.

Going further, Santiago Abascal, leader of the hard-Right pro-deportation Vox party, also climbing in popularity, declared the wave of arrivals as a Sanchez-inspired foreign ‘invasion’ deliberately designed to replace Spaniards.

The dismay of Spaniards has been quick coming. Last weekend, a significant regional election took place in the north-east region of Aragon, the first Spanish poll since the amnesty was announced.

The area is known as Spain’s Ohio because, like the key swing state in the US, it serves as a barometer of the nation’s political mood. Aragon moved sharply to the Right in what was described by analysts as a reaction against the amnesty.

Vox and the PP secured more than 50 per cent of the vote. Sanchez’s socialists collected 24 per cent with a hotchpotch of smaller parties scooping up the rest. ‘It is not the result we wanted,’ the Prime Minister’s party said, in an understatement.

Not only Spaniards are reacting to the amnesty. Some voices in the EU, scrambling to tighten borders amid criticism from Trump’s US, have warned that those seizing the residency chance will not stay in Spain, but slip through to the rest of Europe.

‘When one member state acts alone, the whole European bloc is put at risk,’ Right-wing politicians in Brussels said last week. Spain, with an extreme-Left coalition government clinging perilously to power, is a defiant rebel when it comes to welcoming mass immigration.

Within the EU, it stands alone in accepting migrants with open arms, as other front-line nations struggle to stop the never-ending influx into Europe from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.

Even the European Parliament hardened its stance on migration last week. It voted to stop ‘asylum shopping’, a cynical practice where the migrant chooses where they wish to claim refugee status instead of asking for asylum in the first EU nation they enter.

The EU plans to transfer these ‘cherry-picking’ opportunists back home or to third countries that ‘meet international standards’ outside the bloc, naming Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, India, Kosovo, Morocco and Tunisia as options.

Greece began deporting all migrants entering the country illegally last year, and it has just gone further, pledging ten-year imprisonment for human rights workers who assist their entry or collude with people-smuggling gangs. On Friday night, Athens issued a European arrest warrant for a Norwegian activist who has helped refugees.

In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced a new migration bill that allows a 30-day naval blockade to halt sea arrivals – often from Tunisia and Libya – if needed in an emergency to protect national security and keep public order.

Other migrant-beleaguered EU nations, including Denmark and Germany, are deporting thousands as year as they belatedly bend to the wishes of voters. In the east of Europe, meanwhile, Hungary, Poland and Latvia have shut their doors to asylum seekers despite a controversial EU pledge to fine them millions of euros a year for refusing to take their share.

Earlier this month, Latvia’s foreign minister, Baiba Braze, told the parliament in Riga: ‘We will not accept new migrants under the EU ruling. We will also refuse to pay any EU fines for doing so.’ She cited the importance of national sovereignty and the protection of her country’s people.

Her defiant words will fall on deaf ears in Spain. Here, Prime Minister Sanchez, after the narrowest of election wins three years ago, runs a government held together though a fragile, edgy alliance of socialists and bolshy all-comers from separatist parties. He is battered by corruption scandals and under fire from America – principally Elon Musk – for plotting to silence free speech and ban under-16s from using social media. Polls show he is deeply unpopular.

Despite national elections next year, he has defiantly thrown open his borders – and by extension Europe’s doors to whoever knocks – in what many say is a ‘Merkel’ moment. In 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel did the same to Germany’s borders, letting in 1.2 million annually, provoking the biggest wave of migration into Europe – and subsequently Britain – since the Second World War. It changed Europe irrevocably.

In 2023, the latest figures show 4.3 million non-EU people, quite apart from millions of Ukrainians given war sanctuary, entered the bloc, despite all the Brussels rhetoric over migration controls. Merkel’s amnesty was unilateral – and proved deeply unpopular. Many believe that the Sanchez decree, foisted on many reluctant Spaniards without consultation, will have a similarly devastating impact.

Illegal Algerian migrants living undercover in France have already rushed to the Alicante consulate to apply for the paperwork to kick-start the residency process, Madrid media reports. The end result is that millions of undocumented non-EU migrants already in Europe are likely to chance their arm by crossing open borders to Spain to take up Sanchez’s offer.

Yet Spain already has major problems due to migration.

Criminal gangs are using boats travelling at 100knots to carry migrants, paying up to £10,000 each, from Algeria to Spanish coastal resorts, such as Alicante. It is a deadly journey, as Habib at the consulate queue told me, because the overcrowded boats overturn, or passengers get flung out, with the ruthless traffickers motoring on without them.

Last year, there were dozens of bodies of migrants found in the waters off Algeria. From Morocco come further swathes of migrants who aim for the Spanish-owned enclave of Ceuta, which overlooks the Rock of Gibraltar on the African side of the Strait. They climb over an imposing wire fence designed to keep them out.

Since Christmas, Spain has suffered treacherously bad weather in Storm Leonardo. But that has not stopped those heading for Ceuta, who have scaled its two 20ft barriers. They know bad visibility means they cannot be seen by border guards. More than 400 crossed into the enclave in January, one of the highest monthly figures ever recorded during winter. Social media videos show migrants celebrating after scaling the fence during one stormy night in January.

Amazingly, in the past eight weeks, migrants have also used the freakishly bad weather to hide in the mist from Spanish border patrol vessels as they left the beaches of Morocco to swim along the coast to reach Ceuta, less than a mile away. Some had lifejackets, others makeshift buoyancy aids, including, in a particularly dangerous case, empty plastic drinks bottles in each hand.

The result of the Storm Leonardo influx is that a holding camp on Ceuta is now overwhelmed. It is designed for 512 people, but last weekend was housing at least 800. Tents with temporary beds have been set up on the centre’s basketball courts, and border police report a shortage of medical help for arrivals suffering hypothermia from the cold seas.

Last Saturday, the day before I visited the enclave, the Spanish Interior Ministry authorised the transfer of 61 migrants, primarily Moroccans and sub-Saharan Africans, from the Ceuta camp to the Spanish mainland, 25 miles away by ferry, on humanitarian grounds.

To avert a crisis, government workers were dispatched to the enclave to accelerate the process.

‘We hope to be next to go,’ said three Sudanese migrants, looking chirpy and in their early 20s, lying on the rocks as a rare glimpse of the sun appeared. ‘We have been in the camp since last year, and came by swimming from Algeria.’

News of the ferry transfers were also welcomed by Moroccans Otmane, 28, and his friend, Abdul, 20, who live at the Ceuta camp and desperately want to reach Spain.

I met them last Sunday afternoon as they were climbing up the steep hill back to the camp after taking a run on the promenade. Both swam into Ceuta in January at the height of the storms.

Abdul, who has good English, said: ‘It was a long time in the water, but we made it together. It was worth it because soon we will be sent to the main country of Spain.’

‘But will you stay there?’ I asked, having told him I was from Britain. He responded instantly, without any prompting: ‘My personal dream is to reach Spain, and then go to your UK, to study, to have a house of my own.’

It was the same story last week in Spain’s second city Barcelona, with a large Pakistani population. They gathered in lines outside their consulate to apply for the certificates showing they had no criminal history at home, so allowing them to apply for the amnesty.

Waiting there on Monday was Haides Himm, 19, who said: ‘I have been in Spain for two years, living illegally. I have not been able to work officially. When I get the residency, I could stay in Spain. Or I might go to England if I see a job there, whatever the best option is.’

Queuing alongside him, Mohammed Rain, 22, said he had spent two years in London on a college course, before moving to Spain.

‘Now I will have a future in Europe,’ he said. ‘We Pakistanis are all very happy with what the government has done here.’

The euphoric words of Mohammed will, no doubt, delight Prime Minister Sanchez, but chill the hearts of the many Spaniards who believe his amnesty is a dangerous and deluded folly.