The recent announcement of an extraordinary regularization of migrant residents in Spain by the government has caused a major shake-up in the political landscape, largely reframing the public discourse and triggering positions of every kind. Political forces backing the government have been joined by numerous social entities, civil organizations, and religious groups in welcoming a measure that will allow around 500,000 people to leave irregular status and begin to enjoy life in our country under less hostile conditions. However, right-wing political forces have openly opposed this process with arguments ranging from alleged populism of the measure to more xenophobic or racist claims voiced by Vox.
“The public debate around this issue is not only highly polarized, but also infused with a high emotional charge.”
As the scholar Hein de Haas argues masterfully in his recent work The Myths of Migration, the public debate around this issue is not only highly polarized but also loaded with a strong emotional charge. Indeed, migration, as a total social fact, in Abdelmalek Sayad’s words, meaning its cross-cutting impact on nearly every dimension of social life—demographic, labor, educational, religious, etc.—consistently generates opinions among the citizenry, which not only makes the topic highly divisive but also a particularly juicy target for partisan political combat.
This article does not aim to reach a consensus that seems almost impossible, but it does provide some data to the public debate that, from a scientific perspective, can offer more tempered arguments. We will focus on the supposed “pull effect.”
A phenomenon that has been studied
A few days ago, an alarmist headline in the newspaper ABC stated: “Experts warn that regularization will trigger a large pull effect and fuel trafficking.” This caught my attention precisely because it invoked supposed experts, whereas one would expect that, among them, at least those of us who study migration academically would be consulted. It is clear that this did not happen, since it would be difficult to sustain with scientific arguments not only the existence of the supposed pull effect but also the connection between the proposed measure and a serious issue like trafficking.
First, it is necessary to clarify what “pull effect” means in verifiable terms: the idea that regularization increases later arrivals because it acts as an incentive. To evaluate that, intuition or simple “before/after” comparisons are not sufficient, because migratory movements respond to a complexity of factors. For this reason, the academic literature has tended to use designs that construct a counterfactual: what would have happened without the regularization.
“After the 2005 regularization, there is no clear surge in the number of migrant arrivals that would mark a before and after.”
In the Spanish case, a 2016 study by Larramona and Sanso-Navarro analyzed the 2005 regularization using a synthetic control methodology, which builds a “comparable Spain” from a weighted combination of similar countries that did not regularize. The direct research question was: if the regularization produced a pull effect, Spain should diverge from that counterfactual from 2005 onward. However, after the regularization there is no clear surge in migrant arrivals that marks a before and after, and when the same comparison is made with other countries, Spain does not appear as a rare or exceptional case.
A more recent study, this time from 2025, by Ferran Elias, Joan Monras, and Javier Vázquez-Grenno, studied the same Spanish episode (since the 2005 regularization was the last to date) using municipal registers, a particularly relevant source because it also captures irregular residents. The analysis started from the premise that, if there had been an increase in irregular arrivals induced by the expectation of easy access to papers, it would be reasonable to observe it there. The authors also recall a key institutional element: the regularization then, as now, required proof of prior residence, which reduces its plausibility as an “invitation” to those still outside. This analysis, which included comparisons across provinces, did not detect signals that after the regularization more people arrived drawn by the measure, and overall the results did not fit the idea that regularization could act as a “magnet.”
What happens in other countries?
These evidences are not Spain-specific. For example, in the United States, Pia M. Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny, when analyzing the IRCA reform of 1986 (which legalized millions of people), found that border apprehensions fell immediately after the approval, but returned to normal levels during the application period and in the following years, and they concluded that the amnesty did not alter long-run patterns of undocumented migration from Mexico.
“With that method, the conclusion was that, on average, regularizations did not cause more people to arrive.”
A recent working paper by Elguezabal and Martínez-Zarzoso analyzed migration data to OECD countries over more than two decades (1996–2022) and compared movements as if each year the countries were ‘on equal footing’, i.e., removing the effect of the economy, political changes, and other country-specific circumstances. With that method, the conclusion was that, on average, regularizations did not lead to more people arriving.
Although they note that in some countries increases might be observed in particular contexts, their overall conclusion rejects the existence of an automatic or systematic effect. Still, it is worth noting that a linear approach might fail to capture possible post-regularization surges driven by diverse factors (economic cycles, family networks, route changes, conflicts, etc.), without contradicting the central observation: overall, the evidence does not point to a generalizable magnet.
Positive effects on public finances
In sum, science does not endorse the existence of a pull effect as an automatic consequence of regularization; what these studies reveal is something more mundane and useful: regularization allows people to leave the informal economy, where they are more vulnerable to exploitation and violations of their rights, and to enter the formal economy. Moreover, although economic calculations on migration often carry a utilitarian component widely criticized in migration studies, we cannot ignore the computation by Ferran Elias, Joan Monras, and Javier Vázquez-Grenno: regularizing is not only morally defendable—because it reduces vulnerability and abuse—but also yields positive material effects on the labor market functioning and on public finances. The logic is simple: when a person leaves the informal economy and enters formal employment, the employer begins contributing to Social Security and the person can contribute to income tax if wages permit. According to their estimates, this shift had a meaningful fiscal impact: each newly regularized person increased payroll contributions by about €4,000–€5,000.
“What regularizations do produce is a reduction of irregularity and, therefore, of the vulnerability associated with it.”
Ultimately, in the face of the alarmist rhetoric of the supposed “pull effect,” the available evidence points in the opposite direction: regularizations do not by themselves generate an automatic increase in new arrivals. What they do generate is a reduction in irregularity and thus in the vulnerability associated with it, in addition to positive effects on labor formalization and revenue collection. To sustain a political debate worthy of the moment, we must discard fallacious arguments and rely on facts, even though we must acknowledge that these facts can be used as political weapons on both sides of the spectrum. Perhaps it would be prudent to stop playing with people’s lives; may this article at least help abandon the recurring and fallacious argument: the supposed “pull effect” associated with regularizations.
