Everyone wanted to speak to him about the same thing; a town council motion, approved unanimously and across party lines, calling on the central government to push forward with a stalled proposal to regularise undocumented migrants in Spain.
“To us, it was the most natural thing in the world,” explained Núñez Pérez, as he paused to greet residents in the town’s central plaza. In recent decades, migrants from across the globe had been atrracted to Villamalea for the many jobs on offer
Context
"Of late, even some of the most ardent critics of immigration have conceded its necessity; in June Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, the far-right leader who has long called irregular migrants a threat to Europe’s future, said her government would issue nearly 500,000 new work visas for non-EU nationals in the coming years, in addition to the 450,000 handed out since she took power.
While regularisation programmes have long been used across the EU, with 43 put in place by more than a dozen countries between 1996 and 2008, in Villamalea the push to grant papers was also rooted in the town’s history."