New Country Profile: Spain’s Immigration Statistics

November 24, 2009

The Migration Policy Institute has added new immigration data for Spain to its collection of data in the Country and Comparative Tool.

I visited southern Spain a few years ago and found many of its immigration issues similar to those of teh United States, While Spain was a departure point of the history-changing voyage that opened the Americas to waves of European settlers in 1492, contemporary Spain is an exemplar of how much immigration today can transform a country in a short period of time. Did you know:

* Until the late 1980s, more people were leaving Spain than coming in. Similar to Portugal and Ireland, Spain was a country of emigration. The tides changed and from 1990 on, Spain increasingly became a transit country for African migrants headed north, a receiving country for foreign laborers, primarily from Northern Africa and South America, and a place to retire for well-off Europeans.

* Today, Spain is Europe’s leading country of immigration adding more than 4.6 million immigrants (i.e., foreigners or persons without Spanish citizenship) between 1998 and 2008. The size of the foreign population in 2008 was 5.3 million out of a total population of 46 million. In 2008, Spain’s foreign population was higher than that of the United Kingdom (4.2 million).

* Foreigners’ share of the total Spanish population rose sevenfold from 1.6 percent in 1998 to 11.4 percent in 2008.

* Moroccans accounted for the largest share of the foreigners in Spain from 1998 through 2007, but were surpassed by Romanians in 2008 who accounted for 13.9 percent (or 731,000). Other large immigrant communities in Spain in 2008 were Moroccans (653,000 or 12.4 percent) and Ecuadoreans (428,000 or 8.1 percent). The top three countries of origin accounted for 1.8 million people, or more than a third of the foreign population in Spain in 2008. Since the late 1990s, Spain has absorbed a large and extraordinarily diverse immigrant flow from three continents: Europe, Africa, and South America.

* In 2008, the number of new arrivals fell 25 percent to 692,000, down from 920,000 in 2007. The greatest decline came from other European countries. For example, the flows from Romania and Bulgaria fell by more than 60 percent. There were slight declines in the number of migrants who came from Africa and Oceania in 2008; flows from the Americas declined by a quarter and those from Asia by 10 percent.

* The number of foreigners who acquired Spanish citizenship increased every year between 1997 and 2007 (except between 1999 and 2000). More than 71,000 foreigners became Spanish citizens in 2007.

* More than 7,600 new applications for asylum were made in 2007, 44.6 percent higher than in 2006 (5,297), but substantially lower than in 1993 when about 12,600 asylum applications — the highest in nearly three decades — were submitted.