Spanish Government Makes It Easier For Juvenile Immigrants To Become Resident

Spanish Government Makes It Easier For Juvenile Immigrants To Become Resident.

The Spanish Secretary of State for Migration has implemented a change in the regulations of the Immigration Law to facilitate the procedures for thousands of unaccompanied foreign minors and juveniles who arrive in Spain irregularly.

The objective is to make the set of rules that apply to immigrant children and adolescents more flexible and that make it difficult to obtain their residence and work permits. Without documents, hundreds of kids, are subject to recurrent targets of far-right attacks and are doomed to marginalisation.

The draft of the royal decree, published by Eldiario.es and to which EL PAÍS has had access, introduces substantial changes to speed up the granting of papers, including the labour market.

The reform focuses especially on juveniles, the most unprotected before the law, and unravels the bureaucratic knot that minors face when they turn 18 years old. The change will make it easier for them to obtain residence and work permits, and their renewal.

The text aims to end a dynamic that is constantly repeated: that is those young people who have not been documented in reception centres as required by law go, overnight, from being protected children to adults in an irregular situation.

When they turn 18, they also have to leave the centres and then they are no longer just young people without papers, but most of them also become homeless. Thus, all the resources that the autonomous communities have invested in their training and inclusion during the time they have been hosted are of little use.

All these barriers ended up reaching the Supreme Court, after being complained about for years by NGOs and lawyers, however, the court ruled further complicating the procedure.

The high court went on to require that those over 19 years of age, in their first documents renewal, have to prove an income, in case of not working, of higher than 400% of the Public Indicator of Multiple Effects Income (IPREM); that is, above €2,000 per month.

The ruling, which began to lead hundreds of young people to irregularity, was the final push for immigrants, through their lawyers, to address the reform of the regulation.

The royal decree lowers the requirements to renew or obtain residence and work authorisation when they reach the age of maturity. The required minimum income is now calculated based on the Minimum Vital Income for an individual beneficiary (€469.9 euros).

That amount can come from a job, but also from social benefits, a more flexible formula that was not allowed before. Furthermore, the financial requirement will not be necessary if the young person is sheltered in an institution that guarantees their maintenance. However, they must present positive integration and training reports from the institution that homes them and show that they do not have a criminal record.

Although the data is not entirely accurate, the autonomous communities officially host some 9,000 foreign minors, the vast majority of whom are over 16 years of age.

The reform in the law will also retroactively benefit hundreds of other young people who have reached the age of maturity in the last five years and who lost or did not obtain their permits because they did not comply with the requirements that are now eliminated. The changes also include a boost in telematic/off-site processing that should streamline the process of registration.

The new law also prevents foreign children and adolescents from having to renew their permits every year. The first authorisation will now be valid for two years and the renewal will cover you for another five years if they are still a minor. Older people, when their residence card expires, may renew it for two more years and opt, depending on each case, for a long-term permit.

Source: El Pais