Faced with a ballooning backlog in the mass regularisation, Spain’s Secretariat of State for Migration has reached an agreement with the country’s provincial extranjería offices to tackle 250,000 pending cases outside normal hours. Under an encomienda de gestión published in the BOE and detailed by El País on 24 July, some 1,300 civil servants have volunteered to work evenings and weekends, earning €10 per file processed. The extraordinary scheme is designed to prevent the legal three-month decision deadline from expiring, which would grant applicants a positive ‘administrative silence’ by default but sow legal uncertainty for employers. By outsourcing basic data-entry and document-scanning to local extranjería staff, the central Unit for the Processing of Extranjería Files (UTEX) hopes to free specialists to focus on substantive assessments and security checks. Business groups have welcomed the move. Multinationals with large seasonal workforces fear that unresolved files could clash with peak hiring in September. “Knowing that files will advance over the summer helps workforce planning,” said the mobility manager of a major logistics firm. Lawyers, however, warn that piece-rate incentives could prioritise speed over quality, increasing the risk of errors that would later have to be corrected on appeal. They call for clear quality-control metrics and random audits. The Ministry insists the support is ‘material and technical’; final decisions will still be taken centrally by UTEX. It also stresses that provisional permits remain valid beyond the 90-day limit, so migrants will not lose legal status while their cases are finalised.
Source: El País
