How to assign bean's property an Enum value in Spring config file?

Have you tried just "TYPE1"? I suppose Spring uses reflection to determine the type of "type" anyway, so the fully qualified name is redundant. Spring generally doesn't subscribe to redundancy!

Use the value child element instead of the value attribute and specify the Enum class name:

<property name="residence">
    <value type="SocialSecurity$Residence">ALIEN</value>
</property>

The advantage of this approach over just writing value="ALIEN" is that it also works if Spring can't infer the actual type of the enum from the property (e.g. the property's declared type is an interface)._{Adapted from araqnid's comment.}

I know this is a really old question, but in case someone is looking for the newer way to do this, use the spring util namespace:

<util:constant static-field="my.pkg.types.MyEnumType.TYPE1" />

As described in the spring documentation.