Russian political researcher Alexander Finiarel has lived in Spain without papers for two years. But soon he (and half a million other refugees) will be able to get documents. This is his story.

In 2026, Spain is granting legal status to large numbers of undocumented migrants. The authorities initially planned to grant status to about 500,000 people, but nearly 1.2 million applied. Russian political researcher and journalist Alexander Finiarel is among those seeking legal status in Spain. He has lived there without it for two years and closely follows migration policy in Europe’s most attractive destination for migrants. At Meduza’s request, Finiarel explains how undocumented migrants live in Spain, what Spaniards think about migration, and how the mass legalization process works from the inside.

How I became an undocumented immigrant

When I moved to Spain, I had no intention of becoming an undocumented immigrant. Two years ago, they brought me and 64 other Russian journalists, activists, and human rights defenders here from Georgia, which was getting more and more dangerous. The plan was for 206 people to come here, and we were supposed to receive humanitarian residence permits on arrival.

But after the first group arrived, the agreement with Spain’s Foreign Ministry fell apart. More than a hundred people awaiting evacuation were stranded in Georgia, while those who had made it to Spain were left without papers or a clear legal status.

My boyfriend and I also had the option of applying for asylum. Since the Russian authorities declared the “LGBT movement” “extremist,” Spain has been accepting Russian LGBTQ refugees fairly readily, judging by the experiences of people I know and members of local refugee group chats. So Spain is probably one of the best options for this group. Applying for asylum on the grounds of political persecution was also fairly straightforward, and many people in our group ended up doing just that.

For the first six months, though, we kept hoping the negotiations with the Foreign Ministry would get somewhere. Besides, Spain’s asylum system is severely overloaded, both by the influx of refugees and by “appointment scalpers.”

Finally, my work requires me to travel within the EU to meet European officials and other Russian human rights advocates. As an applicant for international protection, however, you cannot leave the country where you’ve requested protection. In Spain, it usually takes about two and a half years to get approval.

Without applying for asylum, I can travel around Europe.

Although refugees can obtain citizenship after just five years in Spain, many of us who moved from Georgia chose a different route to legal status: a residence permit based on our ties to Spain. That meant becoming undocumented immigrants.

In Spain, migrants can obtain a residence permit on this basis after two years of continuous residence, provided they haven’t applied for asylum during that period and have no criminal convictions. Applicants simply have to show that they’re already trying to integrate into Spanish society — for example, by working, studying, taking Spanish classes, having family ties, or volunteering with local nonprofits.

We got lucky: a year and a half after we arrived, the Spanish authorities announced an extraordinary legalization program. It doesn’t even require proof of integration.

The challenges undocumented migrants face in Spain — and the advantages of having no legal status

Living without legal status does, of course, come with restrictions and difficulties. The biggest is finding housing. Spain’s population has grown in recent decades because of a large influx of migrants, but all those newcomers head for Madrid and the coasts. These areas also draw people from the rest of the country. Those other parts of Spain have even acquired the nickname “España vaciada” (“emptied Spain”).

As a result, demand has overwhelmed the housing markets in Madrid and on the coasts, and landlords have become extremely selective. In most cases, they choose from several applicants and naturally prefer people whose papers are in order.

Making matters worse, Spanish law protects tenants so strongly that evicting them is practically impossible, even if they stop paying rent. This has given rise to “okupas” — people who either squat in someone else’s home while it’s empty or stop paying rent and refuse to move out.

Landlords, in turn, have started buying insurance to protect themselves against okupas. Companies offering this insurance check prospective tenants’ income. But without legal status, you can’t earn income on the books or pay taxes, so we had nothing to show them.

The easiest way to avoid these checks is to sublet a room. But that wouldn’t work for my boyfriend and me: we both work from home and are constantly on work calls. We didn’t want our calls to disturb anyone, or anyone to disturb us.

So we took the more difficult route: we looked for apartments listed by their owners on Spain’s main property website, contacted them directly, and tried to charm them during apartment showings. Like everyone who moved here at the same time as us, we found housing largely because we managed to win over our landlords. But the search took several months.

I studied Spanish in college, and although I hadn’t practiced for many years, I could speak it reasonably well. That helped. Without knowing the language, we would have had to pay a real estate agent extra to act as an interpreter.

We gave the landlords our work contracts and bank statements. Through friends, we found someone with officially declared income in Spain who agreed to be our guarantor and cover the rent if we couldn’t.

A lease lets you register your address immediately, giving you access to most public services. In Spain, for example, even migrants without residence permits have the right to use the public healthcare system and send their children to school. Unlike people living here legally, though, we don’t pay taxes or social security contributions for these services, because we’re simply off the tax authorities’ radar.

After finding housing, the next problem is opening a bank account. Of course, you can have money paid into foreign bank accounts. But without a Spanish card, you can’t make recurring payments for utilities, internet, phone service, private health insurance, or a gym membership.

I solved this problem by opening an account with the online bank Nickel, which lets you sign up using a passport. But the EU’s 19th sanctions package against Russia closed off that option. Under the new requirements, European banks must restrict services to Russian and Belarusian citizens who don’t have residence permits in the European Economic Area or Switzerland.

Russian refugees with legal status have also been affected. Local banks have become wary of opening accounts for them, and Nickel now requires Russians to have an EU residence permit. Still, people who opened accounts earlier continue to use them, promising to provide their papers once they’ve obtained legal status.

Finding work is another difficulty. Migrants without legal status have no right to work in Spain. Even so, employers hiring for low-skilled jobs in food service or cleaning are often willing to turn a blind eye. But they frequently exploit workers’ precarious status, for example by making them work 11 hours a day, six days a week, for less than the legal minimum wage.

How Spanish society views undocumented migrants

Spain’s laws give people without legal status a fair amount of leeway. Having worked for Russian opposition media and organizations under various legal statuses for a long time, I’m used to operating in a legal gray area, and Spain feels like one of the easiest countries to live in this way.

During my time here, I’ve never encountered hostility because of my undocumented status, even in government offices. Most local services apparently don’t consider it their job to track down undocumented migrants.

Even so, migration is one of the most contentious issues in Spanish politics. The far-right party Vox (“Voice”), which is gaining support, makes fighting illegal immigration a central part of its platform. Polls suggest that it will win next year’s parliamentary election in a coalition with the center-right People’s Party (Partido Popular). But as often happens, they could make both legal and illegal immigration harder: the People’s Party is already proposing new barriers to immigrating to Spain and obtaining permanent residency.

That’s why I don’t share many Russian immigrants’ enthusiasm for these parties, although I do think Spain may need to limit migration until it resolves its housing crisis. For me and for Russians living here legally, a right-wing government would mean more bureaucratic red tape.

Spanish society as a whole is clearly growing tired of newcomers, whether they’re undocumented immigrants, tourists, digital nomads, or British and German retirees. Tourism sparks frequent protests across the country. My Spanish acquaintances also complain about tourists, and especially about expats who don’t learn the language and expect everyone to speak English with them. The main reason for this growing resentment is simple: soaring housing costs.

Migration drives economic growth and has made Spain’s economy the fastest-growing among the major EU countries in recent years. It also reduces the country’s extremely high unemployment. But many Spaniards don’t feel these benefits.

The number of homeless people on the streets is growing. Real incomes here have stagnated for decades, largely because of rising housing costs. Young Spaniards usually live with their parents because they can’t afford to move out. This is partly responsible for the low birth rate, which in turn increases the country’s need for migrants: an aging population is becoming less able to do strenuous physical work.

In summer and at Christmas, the centers of major Spanish cities are packed with tourists. Renting apartments to them, wealthy digital nomads, or foreign retirees is usually more profitable than renting to Spaniards, because foreigners are willing to pay more.

Population growth is overwhelming the healthcare system and social services. Waits to see specialists can sometimes last months. Unions representing doctors, teachers, railway workers, and others regularly strike over excessive workloads and low pay.

Interestingly, opponents of migration mention almost none of these problems. The exception is the far left, which says wealthy tourists, digital nomads, and retirees have made it harder for Spaniards themselves to find housing (“they can afford it, but locals can’t”). Anti-tourism movements have already emerged in many cities, particularly Barcelona.

The right, meanwhile, sees the legalization program as a threat to itself. For example, Vox representatives have said the program is intended to keep the left in power by supposedly giving it new voters — migrants who have obtained legal status. That’s a fairly bold assumption: at least 10 years will pass between obtaining a residence permit and becoming a citizen.

Migrants themselves are often conservative and support the right, especially if they come from a left-wing dictatorship. Venezuelans in Spain, for example, vote for the right much more often than locals do.

Another myth common on the right is that the government gives undocumented migrants free apartments and pays them benefits. There are several counterarguments to this.

First, undocumented migrants are off the state’s radar precisely because they don’t have papers, so it provides them with no assistance. To start receiving help, they need to obtain legal status by applying for asylum.

Spain’s refugee programs aren’t exactly generous. Refugees either live in overcrowded centers or receive a few hundred euros toward rent and another few hundred for everyday expenses. Together, those amounts would barely cover renting a room in a major city. The payments last no more than two years.

Many refugees I know don’t even use these assistance programs and support themselves entirely. They often continue working for Russian companies.

Opponents of migration also often say that migrants take jobs from locals while simultaneously calling them all “layabouts living on government handouts.” In fact, migration has reduced unemployment in Spain, including among locals. Migrants themselves create demand for goods and services, and they take low-skilled jobs while Spaniards take management positions.

In the public imagination, undocumented migrants are often reduced to crowds of Africans storming ashore from boats or forcing their way across Spain’s borders, as happened recently in Ceuta. Yet statistics show that of those who applied for the extraordinary legalization program, 67% are from Latin America, almost 23% from Africa, about 8% from Asia (which includes the Philippines, a former Spanish colony), and less than 1% from Europe. Europe accounted for only about 13,000 of Spain’s undocumented migrants.

The origins of undocumented migrants largely mirror those of migrants to Spain overall, apart from Europeans. EU citizens don’t fall into this category because they can move freely within the Schengen Area. So a significant share of the nearly 13,000 undocumented Europeans are most likely Russians and Belarusians.

People from Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine have been one of the fastest-growing groups of migrants in recent years. There are already about half a million of them here, so Spain is gradually filling up with places serving raf coffee, syrniki, and borscht, as well as stores catering to Slavic communities — especially on the eastern coast.

In Torrevieja, a small resort town near Alicante, the combined number of Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian citizens has grown from 8,000 to 17,000 during the war, reaching 15% of the town’s population. Ukrainians have become Torrevieja’s largest group of foreign residents, while Russians rank third.

How legalization works — and why it’s happening

Critics of mass legalization believe it will, by itself, encourage more undocumented migrants to come to Spain. But such programs are fairly rare. They’re extraordinary events that no one can count on in advance. Spain last ran one in 2005, Belgium in 2000, Portugal in 2004, the U.S. in 2012, and Italy in 2013. Russia also ran one in 2024.

These programs don’t drive illegal immigration; they become necessary because of it. Illegal immigration, in turn, results both from fairly relaxed immigration rules and from local demand for workers.

The extraordinary legalization program had been under discussion since the COVID pandemic. The pandemic drew attention to the fact that many undocumented migrants worked in sectors essential to the country but lacked full access to legal employment and social protections.

Since 2021, civil society groups have collected more than 700,000 signatures in support of mass legalization. More than 900 nonprofits joined the campaign, along with unions, private businesses, and even the church. But the bill stalled in parliament. The governing Socialist Party did not want mass legalization, preferring to expand and simplify existing pathways.

In the end, the far-left party Podemos (“We Can”) pushed the initiative through. To bypass parliament, where every party wanted to add its own conditions to the legalization bill, Podemos secured legalization through a royal decree. The decree was adopted on April 16, 2026.

Under the decree, all undocumented migrants who arrived in Spain before January 1, 2026, and have no criminal convictions are eligible. Between 500,000 and 800,000 people were expected to qualify. But more than a million ended up applying.

My boyfriend and I applied through an organization for LGBTQ migrants where I take language classes. There are quite a few organizations helping migrants across the country, and they often receive state funding. They helped us gather the necessary documents and provided a certificate of “vulnerability,” which the government had added to the requirements at the last minute. It confirms that a migrant is vulnerable because they lack papers. The certificate doesn’t entitle you to anything else.

We submitted our documents in late May. Our lawyer said a letter confirming that our applications had been accepted should arrive from the immigration service a month later, after which we would have to pay a fee of 38 euros per person.

With that letter, we were also meant to receive an identification number for foreigners — a basic form of ID in Spain that makes it much easier to access services.

Without it, for example, I couldn’t sign contracts with half the internet and utility providers or book appointments with government offices online. I had to call or go in person. We were also meant to receive permission to work immediately.

But the process dragged on, as often happens with Spain’s overloaded social services. The unexpectedly large number of applications and the vacation season added to the delays. We received the letter only after three months. Now we’re half a step closer to legal status.

That opens up a much wider range of jobs. We can now start applying for more stable jobs with better labor protections.

Once we pay the fee, the immigration service should start reviewing our applications, and by law a decision should come within three months. Other migrants’ experiences suggest, though, that the process will most likely take at least six months. That’s what happened to people I know who were in Spain on student visas or were trying to obtain residency based on their ties to the country.

If approved, we’ll receive residence permits valid for one year. We’ll be able to renew them if we find work in Spain or register as self-employed to declare our foreign income.

* * *

Spain interests me as a country that lost its empire, went through a civil war and a nationalist dictatorship, and became a fairly stable, open democracy. I think understanding that experience, especially its experience of reconciliation, will be useful for Russia.

That’s why I’m always looking for information here about the civil war. But over the past half-century, Spaniards preferred not to discuss it, adopting the “Pact of Forgetting” to preserve peace after Franco’s death. Only in 2022 did Spain adopt the Democratic Memory Law, which condemns the crimes of Francoism.

The law also gave descendants of people who left during the dictatorship the right to obtain citizenship through a simplified process. More than half a million applications have been approved under this program over the past three years. The law also prompted a wave of discussion about the conflict the country had endured and inspired creative works about it.

I’ve moved many times since leaving my hometown of Lipetsk. And even more since leaving Russia: I’ve lived in Georgia, Turkey, Armenia, and India. I don’t think Spain is the end of my odyssey.

My boyfriend is waiting for legal status, hoping to find work here. I, on the other hand, feel more comfortable in the gray area where I don’t pay taxes, because Russian journalists and human rights advocates don’t earn much, and the pay is extremely unreliable. Paradoxically, I need legal status so I can leave Spain without trouble. I want to enroll in a doctoral program in another country.

So I’ll most likely resume my wanderings after a while. But I still hope to return to Russia one day.