The legal regime of foreigners in the Kingdom of Spain. Contemporary historical evolution

Abstract

The contemporary predominance of the emigration of Catalan and Spanish citizens to foreign countries, first to Latin America and then to northern Europe, meant that during the second half of the 20th century academic attention was focused on this migratory aspect. The policies and legal measures adopted at specific moments of the Old Regime, especially in Catalonia during the Occitan immigration of the 16th century, so important in Old Catalonia, or that caused by the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, were relegated to the most important areas. specialized in modern history, and totally disconnected from any subsequent tradition. This explains why until the middle of the 19th century the Kingdom of Spain did not have immigration regulations, and that it did not even have the status of law (the Royal Decree of November 17, 1852). At the end of the 20th century, the first immigration law was enacted (1985), which did not contemplate the future magnitude of the phenomenon that should be regulated. The migratory dynamic would change radically in a few years, as a result of the Catalan and Spanish economic development generated by the European integration of 1986, which would act as a pole of attraction for people coming, mostly, from the American and African continents. The change in immigration sign required the modification of the law in 2000 to adapt the legal regime to a globalized reality, in which the organization of flows and rights is as important as the attraction of talent and foreign resources, which has been transferred to the present. century an expanded regulatory framework with new legal instruments aimed at providing a legal response to all the dimensions present in the current migration phenomenon.