In April 2026, Spain launched a new regularisation programme for undocumented migrants, which is estimated to benefit more than 500,000 people. At the end of 2025, Germany concluded a regularisation campaign launched in 2023, for which more than 80,000 people applied. These recent examples to which we could add the Italian and Portuguese regularisation campaigns during the Covid-19 pandemic – show us that this type of campaign is by no means exceptional. As the research argues, these campaigns are, in fact, an integral part of European migration policies and provide a response to situations of irregularity caused by employers’ demand for labour, migrants’ aspirations to reach Europe, and the limited number of legal channels available to do so.
Although they are frequent, these campaigns nonetheless provoke strong reactions in the political sphere, where the issue of migration – and irregular migration, in particular – is the subject of highly polarised debates. This is particularly the case in Belgium; but also in France, where Bruno Retailleau – Les Républicains party candidate in the upcoming presidential election – recently proposed to “banish Spain from Europe”, on the grounds that its latest regularisation campaign runs counter to what Europeans want.
Among opponents of granting migrants legal status, it is often argued that this type of policy would encourage new migrants to come to Europe and stay there irregularly, and that regularisation is not backed by public opinion. In a previous survey conducted among the Algerian population, we were already able to demonstrate that the “pull factor” that such a regularisation campaign would supposedly create does not exist. However, the question of whether there is public support for regularisation has received little attention from researchers to date.
Public opinion on migration
There is now a wealth of scientific research on the factors that shape public opinion on immigration in general. These findings tell us that individual characteristics (age, gender, education, ethnicity, etc.), as well as media coverage and interpersonal contact with immigrants, influence attitudes toward immigration.
Furthermore, as evidenced by opinion polls such as the Eurobarometer, the public is generally poorly informed about immigration.
Is it therefore simply a matter of better informing the public to increase support for regularisation campaigns? Although existing studies do not allow us to definitively conclude that corrective information increases support for immigration, they do indicate that presenting factual information in the form of narratives and personal accounts can prove more persuasive than simply presenting statistics.
Similarly, research on the role of framing in discourse analysis has shown that appealing to emotions is a persuasive communication strategy in the field of migration. From all this research, we can therefore conclude that both the content and form of the message are likely to influence people’s opinions regarding the regularisation of undocumented migrants.
A new large-scale survey of the Belgian population
In a recent scientific publication, we present the results of an experiment integrated into an online survey of a panel of 2,121 people representative of the adult resident population in Belgium.
Since the last regularisation campaign organised in 2009, the Belgian political debate on immigration has become significantly polarised. The context therefore seems ill suited to the implementation of a new regularisation campaign, despite the presence of approximately 112,000 undocumented migrants in the country in a country with a population of 11.8 million, of whom 20% are immigrants. On the contrary, the current centre-right federal government led by the Flemish nationalist Bart De Wever intends instead to implement – in the words of the Minister for Asylum and Migration, Anneleen Van Bossuyt – “the strictest asylum and migration policy ever adopted” as this is supposedly “the policy that people are calling for”.
To verify this claim, we sought to measure the actual level of support among the Belgian population for the regularisation of undocumented migrants, but also to test the effect of five different messages on the level of public support for regularisation campaigns.
Participants in the survey conducted by the Bpact polling institute in March 2025 – were therefore randomly assigned to a control group that received no message and five experimental groups that received a message of around 100 words on the subject of regularisation.
These messages presented: (1) scientific data on undocumented migrants in narrative form; (2) the moving story of an undocumented migrant facing deportation and supported by her neighbours; (3) the economic and social benefits of regularising undocumented migrants; (4) double standards in the authorities’ treatment of undocumented migrants compared to that of tax evaders; and (5) the inequalities between wealthy migrants benefiting from privileged access to residence in Europe and disadvantaged migrants with few options for reaching Europe legally.
In our survey, all participants were then asked to state their position on granting undocumented migrants legal status in general, but also on regularisation that would be limited to undocumented migrants who are working, in short-staffed professions, or those with lasting social ties in Belgium. The reason why it is important to distinguish between support for different profiles of undocumented migrants is that even the most ambitious regularisation programmes, such as Spain’s migratory model, which it unveiled this year, make regularisation conditional on specific criteria.
The results of our survey highlight the importance of this differentiated approach. Indeed, only 21% of those surveyed believe that the authorities should regularise all undocumented migrants. In contrast, 53% are in favour of regularising undocumented migrants who are working, and there is slightly more support (54%) for the regularisation of migrants in professions affected by staff shortages. In addition, 45% of respondents supported legal status being granted to those who have forged close social ties in the country. It is also worth noting that between 20% and 25% of participants are neither for nor against making these different categories of people legal.
As regards the impact of the five messages we tested, only two produced a significant effect. Presenting scientific data on undocumented migrants in narrative form (message 1) led to an increase of around 7 percentage points, favouring legalising undocumented migrants in general, as well as those who are working. Exposure to the moving life story of an undocumented person (message 2), meanwhile, led to an 8-percentage-point increase in support for legalising people with long-term ties, and even a 10-percentage-point increase for those in professions facing understaffing issues.
What should be made of the public’s conditional support for regularisation?
Following the analysis of the Belgian case, two main lessons emerge.
On the one hand, while differentiating support for awarding legal status on the basis of certain criteria may raise ethical concerns by risking the creation of a hierarchy among immigrants between those deemed “deserving” and those deemed “undesirable” – this approach can also, in a context of strong political opposition, serve as a starting point for opening up the debate and gradually extending access to legal status to other groups of undocumented migrants.
On the other hand, the study provides two key insights for policymakers. It shows that, contrary to certain preconceptions, there is genuine public support for legalising migrants. It also indicates that this support depends heavily on how the policy is presented: the choice of message and its framing can significantly increase public support and reduce the perceived electoral risk.
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This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
