alt Hacker News> But also note that you are the only one against Spain creating a path for a group of people that live there to gain legal status.
Nah I have an issue with it too, conceptually. You're basically rewarding bad actors for breaking rules and laws which is unfair to those who were and are trying to immigrate legally. At a minimum.
Immigration isn't a moral good, it's just a switch we can flip on or off. Too few people? A given society can have more permissive rules. Too many people? Have more restrictive rules. Being an immigrant is just a random status one has by virtue of moving to another country - it's just paperwork.
I'm probably missing something but your last sentence doesn't seem to agree with the rest of the post. If it's just paperwork then surely nothing bad happens not following it (mostly because it's just not possible to immigrate lawfully to most countries in this age).
Note that I'm not defending unlawful immigrants; but once you spend a large amount of life in a country and you did nothing bad I don't see any issue with said country allowing you to stay. It's just acknowledging the status quo. Of course having a safe legal path to residency is obviously much better but too many politicians today as well as in the past are incentivised to disallow that.