In practice, given the shared Hassaniya language and ethnicity, combined with potential fraud and existing networks, we are talking about the entire Hassaniya-speaking region: a population with a strong incentive to migrate that includes the Polisario camps in Tindouf (Algeria), parts of Algeria, the Moroccan Sahara and other Moroccan regions, Mauritania, and parts of Mali.
Sumar has of course claimed that the law theoretically only concerns people born in the former Spanish Sahara province before 29 September 1977. It fails to mention that, through indirect effects, their spouses, children and parents will also be able to enter Spain via family reunification — without themselves being covered by the naturalisation law or even necessarily being Sahrawi.
Family Reunification and the Snowball Effect
Under the family reunification regime, spouses, children and parents can obtain a residence permit. Added to this is the provision allowing the naturalisation of children within three years of their parents’ naturalisation, not to mention the standard naturalisation-by-residence route, which is reduced to two years for all those concerned.
The phenomenon whereby a single person can, through a snowball effect, bring in four to six others is amplified by high birth rates in the camps and the region (estimated at three to five children per woman according to studies), as well as by the extreme ease with which the required documents can be forged: old Spanish identity cards (even expired ones), school certificates, hospital certificates, driving licences, documents related to pensions paid by the Spanish administration, and so on.
Easily Falsifiable Documents
The most complex document, the Spanish DNI from the era of Spanish Sahara, was nothing more than a cardboard card covered with a thin protective plastic layer, filled in by typewriter or by hand, with handwritten signatures and an ink fingerprint. It contained no modern technology, no hologram, and no security features comparable to those used today.
During the hurried withdrawal of Spanish troops and administration in 1976, tons of official forms, blank family record books, health booklets from colonial hospitals and official stamps were left behind in the drawers of local administrations and were looted. The existence in the region of a traffic in genuine blank period supports is documented: old official papers, former identity cards and blank booklets abandoned during the Spanish departure in 1976 will be used to produce false identities.
This is not mere speculation. Frauds by the Polisario had already been noted by the United Nations during the census process, which contributed to the inability to establish a consensual electoral roll and, ultimately, to the definitive abandonment of the referendum.
In such a scenario, the paper and plastic used would themselves be authentic and genuinely date from the 1970s, which could allow such forgeries to deceive basic scientific analyses based solely on the age or composition of the materials. If the DNI is easily falsifiable, there is no need to spell out how simple it is to forge ordinary school certificates.
No Reliable Way to Verify Family Ties in Tindouf
In the specific case of the Polisario camps in Tindouf, the Spanish administration has, by definition, no means of verifying with certainty the reality of family relationships — husband, wife, children or parents — within a stateless population whose authorities of the self-proclaimed “SADR” are not recognised by Spain. This situation creates an additional risk of falsified family links in order to bring more people into the European Union through invented genealogies, fake children, marriages of convenience, and so on.
The possibility of cross-checking information against the Spanish census of 1974 also runs up against the fact that it was not a perfect register. It was extremely difficult to accurately census a Sahrawi population that was still largely nomadic and regularly crossed porous borders with Mauritania, Algeria or Morocco.
Many Sahrawis also did not have a fixed surname in the Western civil-status sense, but used oral filiations such as “son of…”. The Spanish colonial administration transcribed these names phonetically, leading to numerous approximations, duplicates and omissions.
During later UN attempts to rely on this file to organise a referendum, the experts themselves admitted that integrating certain tribal sections constituted a genuine “bureaucratic nightmare” and that the original Spanish file alone did not allow formal identification of each individual.
Spain also does not possess a centralised digital database in which one could simply enter the number of a 1970s DNI and instantly see the photograph and name of its holder. At the time, the registers consisted of cardboard cards and physical documents, kept locally and distributed mainly between the governorates of Laayoune and Villa Cisneros (today Dakhla). Part of these paper archives were lost, destroyed or scattered during Spain’s hurried departure in 1976.
Another possible scenario is the use of the identity of a Sahrawi who died during the colonial period when their death was never properly recorded in the Spanish registers.
A Magnet for Criminal Networks
Because the law makes naturalisation relatively easy and also creates a knock-on effect allowing direct descendants and ascendants to apply for nationality in turn, criminal networks will naturally be incentivised to focus not only on document forgery but also on the falsification of family ties — sham marriages, false kinship links, invented genealogies, etc.
There is no doubt that the document-forgery and human-trafficking networks already highly active in the region will generate record revenues by abusing this permissive law that easily opens the path to a European nationality. The fraud will extend not only to the militiamen of the Polisario camps in Algeria (including those never registered by Spain), but more broadly to the entire Hassaniya zone — Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania and Mali — of similar ethnicity and language, who will easily be able to deceive a Spanish civil-registry official by passing themselves off as Sahrawi.
