The number of citizenship decisions for foreigners in Spain has increased by 300% since last August, government authorities said.
According to the Spanish Justice Minister Pilar Llop in these months increased from an average of 4,800 monthly resolutions to 19,000thanks to the robotization of the system.
“The system is working, I’ll tell you I’m there, more than 300% more cases being resolved compared to those that were previously resolved,” he said.
The “robotization” of the system is literal. Llop explained that some robots are now performing some parts of the procedure, “just a formality,” previously performed by officers.
“It gives us very good results,” he stressed, quoted by Europa Press.
The minister explained Around 125,000 applications for citizenship are received annually based on residence alone“a huge volume”, meaning “participation in a very varied casuistry”.
There are also other procedures such as original letters or applications to waive the residence requirement to regain Spanish nationality.
Llop described the plan, which the government adopted in 2021 to facilitate the processing of files in civil status registers, as “successful” and assured that it has been working since then The number of closed cases was higher than the number allowed.
This year, he stressed, they opted for “automated systems” that “streamline management.”
In August, the Spanish government launched one Computer application for automating processes who are not decision makers, which enabled nearly 35,000 cases to be resolved in one month, 10 percent of the total.
“We believe that the application will continue to work and we will be able to unlock this situation of nationalities because people have been waiting for this for a long time,” said the then-minister.
By September, Spain had amassed around 350,000 applications for naturalization from people already living in the country, many of them immigrants from Latin America.
In 2021, 144,012 foreigners residing in the Iberian nation acquired Spanish citizenship, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics of Spain.
The country with the most new citizens was Morocco with 42,000.
Then come three Latin American countries: Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia, each with 8,300. The Dominican Republic and Venezuela each added more than 6,000.
Almost 5,000 Cubans living in Spain acquired Spanish citizenship in 2021.