On 23 October, a unit head in the European Commission signed a letter confirming that Brussels had registered a complaint from Junts, the Catalan party of Carles Puigdemont, against Spain's mass regularisation of immigrants. The Commission said it would examine the complaint "in the light of applicable EU law." The detail surfaced on 2 November, in El Español's report on the file, and it is worth reading slowly, because the wording is careful in a way that tells you where the discomfort sits.
Madrid presents the regularisation as a labour-market and humanitarian fix. Ministers talk about registered workers, contributions and people finally coming out of the shadows. The numbers are the proof. Brussels, for its part, says the decision to regularise is a "national competence" and that it is not questioning Spain's right to do it. What it is looking at is the method. Did Spain inform the other member states as it should have? Were expulsion and return procedures closed without individual review? Were permits granted to asylum seekers who had withdrawn their claims? Was the language requirement handled properly?
Those are not small questions. Junts' summary of its complaint describes asylum becoming a shortcut, with the test of protection replaced by access to an ordinary residence permit. That is a claim about process, not about any individual who applied. And it lands on the core contradiction. The government is proud of the count. The Commission is silent on how the count was produced.
The method was also chosen with care. The regularisation was done by royal decree in April, not by a law debated in the Cortes. Junts argues that this was a deliberate way of avoiding parliament. The permit it produces lets holders travel through Schengen for up to 90 days in every 180. A residence decision taken in one capital therefore becomes a mobility question for twenty-six other states, and none of them were asked in advance, according to the complaint.
The timeline is the part I find most telling. The Commission's own annex describes a preliminary assessment within two months of registration, and a decision on whether to open formal proceedings or close the file within a year. The complaint does not suspend the regularisation. It does not cancel the permits already granted. The Supreme Court, asked in July by the Generalitat Valenciana and Aragón to suspend the decree, declined to do so and declined to refer the question to the Court of Justice "at this procedural moment." The appeals remain open.
So the structure is clear. The thing is done first and its legality is reviewed later. By the time a Commission file reaches a decision, the cohort has signed leases, taken jobs, enrolled children in schools and built a life inside a legal status that no one has finally tested. A sanction, if it ever comes, would arrive as a fine against a government for an outcome that has already been absorbed.
The enforcement picture is the other side of the same coin. Return orders are central to any credible asylum or immigration system. A regularisation that archives expulsion files is, in effect, an admission that many of those orders were not going to be carried out. The El Español piece sits alongside related reporting on Spain being the only EU member state to vote against a regulation to speed up expulsions after the Ceuta crisis, and on EU urgent aid for Ceuta being held up over questions Madrid had not answered. Read together, the record shows a government that prefers to decide on the ground and explain later, and a Commission that prefers to ask after the fact.
None of this makes the people who received permits the problem. They applied under a rule the state wrote. The question is whether the state can write a rule like that without a law, without its partners and without a clear return policy, and then call the outcome a plan. The honest answer, from the documented record, is that it can, at least until someone in Brussels finishes reading the file.
What I cannot resolve from here is what happens to the people already inside the system if the method is eventually found wrong. Nobody in the chain has said. The complaint will move through the Commission's calendar. The permits will not wait for it.