'The system will collapse': Spain's immigration staff go on strike

It’s less than a month since Spain’s new Immigration Law came into force, multi-faceted legislation which among other points will regularise the residency documents for potentially hundreds of thousands more foreigners.

READ MORE: Seven key points to understand Spain's new immigration law

This has understandably increased the workload of civil servants at Spain’s extranjería (immigration) offices, who warned before the law came into force that they were already overstretched, staging a strike to raise awareness for their situation.

On Monday June 16th, hundreds of immigration staff stopped working for two hours in Murcia, Barcelona, Toledo, Valencia, Almería Málaga, Madrid, Tenerife and extranjería offices across Spain’s 50 provinces.

"We're not against the immigration reform," Joaquín García Poblete, head of Spanish trade union CCOO’s Ciudad Real branch, told Spanish daily ABC.

"But the officials who are supposed to process the cases haven't been included. If staff numbers aren't bolstered, the system will collapse."

The situation, according to the union, affects not only public employees, but also thousands of migrants in Spain seeking to regularise their status, as well as employers in strategic sectors such as agriculture and construction, who depend on this workforce.

“In Madrid, there are 28,000 people who have submitted their documents and are waiting to hear back; that’s a lot of lives,” César Pérez, head of immigration at the Ministry of Territorial Policy, told El Periódico de España.

Extranjería offices across Spain are dealing with a workload that’s “between 50 and 400 percent higher” than it was before the immigration reform began on May 20th.

Staff are also acutely aware that their work can have a huge impact on people's lives, adding extra pressure to their daily routines.

“It’s unmanageable because there’s no staff, training is delayed, and instructions on how to apply the new regulations are unclear,” Pérez explained.

This is resulting in waiting times for residency documents continuously increasing.

READ MORE: Why waiting times at Spain's immigration offices could get even longer

In Madrid, the time for a foreigner to get a reply to their application has reportedly gone from 76 to 90 working days (around four months) in a matter of a week.

In Málaga, where 100 percent of extranjería staff took part in Monday’s stoppage, they protested that immigration workers have "lowest salary conditions in the entire State Administration, without a productivity bonus, without access to a remote work model, and with an outdated job structure that hasn't been reviewed for more than two decades."

The fear now is that as the summer approaches and many of these overworked employees take their holidays, the backlog will become "catastrophic" due to the lack of new staff members to help with the extra workload.

Extranjería workers estimate there are anywhere between 400,000 and 800,000 foreigners in Spain who need to obtain or update their residency papers.