The number of immigrants living in the European Union reached 64.2 million in 2025 — up from roughly 40 million in 2010 — according to a new report from the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies. The same year, Brussels activated its long-awaited EU Talent Pool to recruit more skilled workers from outside the bloc, fully operationalised biometric border controls, and watched Spain regularise half a million undocumented residents. The data confirm that Europe is navigating a migration inflection point: simultaneously more open at the front door and more controlled at the gate.
Spain accounts for roughly one-third of the EU’s net immigrant population growth in recent years, with its immigrant share rising around 8%. That is an outsized contribution for a country that as recently as the 2010s was itself a source of emigration. Germany remains the bloc’s absolute leader in immigrant numbers, hosting approximately 18 million people born abroad — around a fifth of the EU total. Luxembourg sits at the extreme end of the distribution: immigrants make up 52% of its resident population, reflecting the Grand Duchy’s role as a financial and institutional hub that draws talent from across Europe and beyond.
The Martens Centre report frames these numbers in structural terms. Ageing demographics across member states mean that immigrant labour is no longer a political option but an economic necessity. The EU’s working-age population is projected to shrink significantly over the coming decade, and the question facing policymakers is not whether to accept more workers but how to manage the flows more deliberately.
March 2026 saw the formal enactment of the EU Talent Pool — a cross-border matching platform connecting employers in participating member states with qualified non-EU workers. The mechanism is designed to reduce the patchwork of national recruitment systems that currently force employers to navigate 27 different administrative frameworks. Participation remains voluntary for member states, which limits its immediate reach, but the platform represents the first EU-wide infrastructure for legal labour migration at scale.
The timing is deliberate. Demographic pressure is already visible in the data, and the Talent Pool is meant to begin routing workers toward sectors with acute shortfalls — healthcare, construction, digital services — before those shortfalls become crises.
On 10 April 2026, the EU’s Entry-Exit System (EES) became fully operational across Schengen external borders. The biometric system recorded 45 million crossings in its first weeks and flagged 24,000 refusals — travellers who had exceeded their authorised stay or were flagged by border databases. EES replaces manual passport stamping with automated face and fingerprint recognition, giving border authorities real-time visibility on overstays for the first time.
The system’s activation was years behind schedule, delayed repeatedly by technical integration challenges at national border points. Its full rollout marks a significant shift in how the EU enforces its own rules on third-country nationals, even as it opens new legal channels via the Talent Pool.
While EES tightens external controls, Spain moved in the opposite direction domestically. Royal Decree 316/2026 created a regularisation pathway for approximately 500,000 undocumented residents — one of the largest such exercises by any EU member state in recent memory. Eligibility conditions include demonstrated continuous residence and employment ties. The decree reflects Spain’s acute labour market needs in sectors like agriculture, hospitality, and care work, where irregular migrants have long filled gaps that legal recruitment channels could not.
The regularisation will affect EU-wide statistics on immigrant populations once integrated into national registries, and could complicate cross-border labour mobility data in the near term.
The April 2026 update calls for greater coherence between member state immigration policies and EU-level frameworks, arguing that the current gap between formal rules and practical implementation creates legal uncertainty for migrants and administrative inefficiency for employers. The report highlights a European Court of Human Rights ruling against Belgium as a marker of the human cost of policy incoherence, and argues that regularisation schemes like Spain’s, while politically controversial, address a legal limbo that member states have collectively allowed to persist.
The report’s implicit argument is that the EU is already a continent of mass immigration; the remaining policy choice is whether to manage that reality or react to it.
Source: Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies — Migration Update April 2026
