National inclusion, local exclusion: the case of Social Settlement in Spain

Spain’s Social Settlement regularisation programme is a prima facie inclusive policy that allows irregular immigrants to acquire residence permits after three years of continuous residence. Residence is determined through the certification of inclusion in a municipal population registry. Each municipality is enabled to designate its own registration requirements, which disproportionately impact irregular immigrants. Given this highly decentralised legalisation model, this paper analyses how municipal rules structure irregular migrants’ regularisation opportunities and outcomes. I illustrate how the variation in requirements creates different incentives and challenges for irregular immigrants attempting to regularise their legal status according to their respective locality. Since housing and the municipal registry are inextricably linked, racial discrimination in the housing market disproportionately diminishes the opportunities for African irregular immigrants to regularise their legal status in some municipalities. By continuously failing to provide national standards for municipal registration requirements, the state allows some municipalities to facilitate regularisation and others to discreetly impede it. The varied experiences of immigrants with the municipal registry and the regularisation process in Spain exemplify local mechanisms of exclusion even in the face of national inclusion measures.