Abstract This article examines how migrant-led activism in Spain uses collective narratives to legitimize migration regularization and enact citizenship. European states regulate human migration through legal status, producing administrative irregularity that restricts access to work, welfare, and protection, and that structures everyday life through prolonged bureaucratic waiting, suspended plans, precarious work, and exposure to preventable harm. Against this backdrop, the campaign “Regularización Ya” launched a Popular Legislative Initiative seeking residence permits for people living in administrative irregularity in Spain. We analyzed original tweets from the campaign’s official account posted during the signature-collection period (December 2021–December 2022), using reflexive thematic analysis interpreted through a collective-narrative lens. We show that the campaign weaves collective narratives that link longstanding and ongoing exclusion to present mobilization and future horizons of shared belonging. It frames irregularization as a temporal injustice (lives put “on hold” through bureaucratic waiting and institutional neglect) and mobilizes this framing to build alliances with civil-society actors and citizens. By circulating these narratives in the digital public sphere, organizers amplify migrant voice and perform citizenship through public claim-making. Overall, the study shows how time becomes a political resource in migrant-led struggles and how regularization is framed as overdue social justice rather than an exceptional concession.
Zisakou et al. (Fri,) studied this question.