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A few minutes’ walk from Calle Ponzano, where many madrileños go to drink, graze and chat into the early hours, a more sober ritual is playing out in the austere surroundings of the offices of Madrid’s regional transport consortium.

Every few minutes, individuals or couples emerge from its doors into the bright spring sunshine. The unlucky ones leave with a frown; the lucky ones with a document confirming their use of public transport through a trackable, top-up travel card.

Humdrum as it may seem, the certificate is one of the documents that allows undocumented migrants to prove prior residence in Spain and regularise their status under a new government decree that is set to benefit at least 500,000 people.

Among them is Gimbad Mosquera, a 46-year-old musician from Antioquia in Colombia who had travelled to the consortium office in the hopes of taking advantage of the decree so that he can start playing gigs across Spain and the rest of Europe with his vallenato band.

Shiva Pyuthani and his girlfriend Sirjana Ghising, both from Nepal, had collected their transport certificates and would like to work in hospitality.

“We’ve come here so that we can work and so that we can earn money to send home so we can support our parents and our families,” said Ghising.

At a time when many European countries are pulling up drawbridges and sharpening their anti-migrant rhetoric, Spain’s socialist government has decided to champion the economic and social benefits of migration with the massive regularisation programme, which began last week.

The scheme, whose application period runs until the end of June, offers a legal residence permit with an initial validity of one year. It is open to undocumented migrants who can prove they arrived in Spain before 31 December last year, have been in the country for at least five months at the time of application, and can show that they have no criminal convictions in Spain or in their countries of origin.

As far as Spain’s governing socialists are concerned, the regularisation programme is a long-overdue attempt to bring workers out of the informal economy and provide them with the same rights that others enjoy. But their conservative opponents in the People’s party (PP) have suggested the move will overwhelm Spain’s public services, while the far-right Vox party has again claimed that the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, is trying to replace the Spanish population and “accelerate the invasion”.

The political point-scoring mattered little to those who have travelled to the regional transport consortium as they wrestle with the rules of regularisation.

Mosquera, who has been in Spain for 13 months, had managed to obtain an appointment to present all the necessary documentation for Wednesday morning. The problem was that he still did not have his transport certificate – hence his trip to the consortium office – or two other supporting documents.

“There’s been lots of confusion and it’s hard to know how to navigate the process,” he said.

His Venezuelan partner, Yelitza Villega, said that while the system was complicated, “to be honest, I thought it would be even more difficult”. She added, however, that those who could afford to were paying lawyers to handle their applications and make the necessary appointments.

One Peruvian woman, who did not give her name, said that Latin Americans – who make up the overwhelming majority of undocumented workers in Spain – were using WhatsApp groups to share information on documentation and appointments.

“You just have to be on top of all this,” she said. “It’s really useful to go to the talks that NGOs are organising, where lawyers explain exactly what you need and where you need to go to get it. The official information isn’t great, so people are relying on NGOs or paying lawyers – if they can spare €300.”

The woman also said that some people seeking certificates of vulnerable status from NGOs were having to get up at dawn and queue for hours. Photos from different parts of Spain have shown huge queues outside town halls and consular offices as the regularisation process begins.

Although the government has said it expects the scheme to benefit around half a million people, others have suggested that many more could be eligible. According to a report from the Funcas thinktank, there are around 840,000 undocumented migrants in Spain. Most of them – 760,000 people – are Latin American (including 290,000 Colombians; 110,000 Peruvians, and 90,000 Hondurans), while 50,000 are from African countries and 14,000 are from Europe.

Police unions have warned that the sheer scale of applications could saturate the system and tie officers up in bureaucracy. Last week, immigration officers called off a strike that had been proposed to highlight the conditions resulting from the regularisation scheme after the government offered them improved conditions.

Then there have been the political squabbles. While Sánchez has acknowledged that the scheme swims against the prevailing tide, he has insisted it is the right thing to do both morally and economically. “When did recognising rights become something radical?” the prime minister asked in January. “When did empathy become something exceptional?”

The government has also pointed out that this is hardly the first such process to be implemented in Spain: between 1986 and 2005, more than one million people were regularised in six separate schemes – two of which were implemented by PP governments.

But the PP’s current leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, is opposed to the latest regularisation, claiming it is irresponsible, will apply to more than a million people, and will regularise migrants who have “assaulted a woman or robbed a [Spanish] citizen”. The government has reminded Feijóo that only those without criminal records are eligible, and has accused him of “mud-slinging”.

Vox, meanwhile, has asked Spain’s supreme court to suspend the regularisation process “in order to avoid such awful consequences as the forced change of the electoral body or the collapse of public services”.

The migrants heading in and out of the regional transport consortium on Tuesday morning all said their main aim was finding decent work. Were everyone eligible for regularisation to find a job, the benefits for Spain’s economy could be significant. The authors of a study into the 2005 regularisation of almost 600,000 non-EU immigrants found that tax revenues increased by about €4,000 per regularised immigrant a year, and that the policy had not led to “magnet effects” in encouraging further arrivals.

MD Abdal, a 23-year-old Bangladeshi who has been in Spain since last November, said he was taking Spanish lessons and looking forward to becoming part of society.

“I think Spain is a kind, humanitarian country and I’m very grateful to its government,” he said. “I chose Spain because it’s a multicultural and diverse country that supports people.” Abdal is hoping to find work in a restaurant. In the meantime, he has a simple plan: “I will do my best and I will work hard.”