Spain's August 6 population figures ignore the migrant regularization

The regularization does not show up in the August 6 register figures

The extraordinary regularization of migrants has not moved Spain's population figures one bit, according to the statistics published by the INE (Spain's national statistics institute) on August 6. The process is being sold as historic, with more than one million applications approved, yet the municipal register grew by just 200,000 people in six months. Impeccable: if you can't notice it, it must not have peine.

Half a million announced, more than a million regularized

The figures don't add up even by comparison. In some quarters the increase reached 160,000 residents, and now, with a regularization of more than one million, the statistics barely accelerate. At first, half a million regularizations were estimated; in the end there were more than double that. And that difference had to show up in the accounting between registered residents and foreigners with legal residence. It hasn't.

The official explanation holds that all those people were already registered and that the "grandchildren law" (a law granting Spanish citizenship to descendants of Spaniards) will have little effect because the descendants live outside Spain. It makes sense. But then the question is a different one: how reliable are figures that allow for predicting half of a regularization and end up being double without the statistics even noticing?

The shadow of the 2027 electoral roll

August 6 passed without a stir. The INE data, skeptics say, are worth what they're worth; the municipal register has been admitting people who never set foot in the country for years. The suspicion of a tweaking of figures to avoid social alarm hovers over the publication. If the 2027 electoral roll is built on these foundations, the result will predictably be as unassailable as it is suspicious. Though that, of course, is something the INE will no longer say.