On Friday afternoons the beaches of Barcelona are bustling with locals-foreigners who take advantage of the sunny days (even the cold ones) to play volleyball. On any given day, the center of the Catalan capital is a hive of young foreigners who work remotely, and some of them, who coincide in a coworking near the cathedral, explain: “I came as an expatriate,” quotes Andrew McGarvey, a Scot, 33 years; “Me with the university internships,” continues Estefanía Gordillo, 27-year-old Colombian; “I because of the entrepreneurial environment,” says Justin Varilek, American, 35 years old. All three have higher education. All three put a face to a fact with numerous consequences: Barcelona is specializing in attracting a qualified international population compared to Madrid, the other great magnet for migration from abroad to Spain.
According to Antonio López-Gay, director of the Center d’Estudis Demogràfics, to La Vanguardia, in 2022 (this is the latest known data) the city of Barcelona will attract about 40,000 people from abroad with higher education and 10,000 from other provinces in Spain; Madrid capital about 40,000 foreigners with that level of education and 30,000 from Spain. Barcelona, thus, attracts the same number of qualified people from abroad as Madrid, but with half the population.
Because Madrid and Barcelona are, no matter how you look at it, the two great migratory poles in Spain, but today, while the Spanish capital is the main protagonist in internal migrations and takes, for example, half of the entire positive balance Due to the internal movement of young people between 16 and 34 years old, the picture changes in terms of the incorporation of foreign and qualified population. Here the Catalan capital stands out.
The details are still being worked out, says López-Gay, because “the flow data is subject to a confidentiality agreement,” he adds. Even the National Institute of Statistics (INE) delves into the nebula by responding to this newspaper that “at the moment” there are no disaggregated numbers by province, immigrants and educational level but according to the demographer, “in effect, the vast majority are between 25 and 39 years old and we do not have data on the type of studies,” he details.
And in response to this, Ricard Zapata-Barrero, director of the interdisciplinary research group on immigration at the Pompeu Fabra University, indicates that “I do not know the causes. There are people from the global north and global south who settle here. In other countries there are policies to attract them, here they don’t and people come the same. I understand that it is a young profile, around 30 years old, and also that they are often people in the digital field who have it easier, so we should look at who provides the income beyond those allocated by multinational companies with specific profiles. There are many questions that are generated and few answers, although it is a very consolidated topic,” he insists.
Andrew McGarvey is Scottish from near Glasgow and is 33 years old. He studied computer science and business. He works in his family’s human resources company, focused on the financial sector in the United Kingdom, and he does so from Barcelona, teleworking, and going there only for specific meetings. He arrived in Barcelona, however, when he worked for HP as a computer scientist. “They told me that they were opening an office here and that it was possible for me to leave. The perfect option,” he comments. He’s been there for 10 years now. He plans to stay. The climate affects him as much as the international environment or that not everything is “working during the week and living only on the weekends like he spends in Scotland. “I am very active here.” His group of friends is also very international, starting with his partner, a Peruvian nurse trained in Catalonia, he explains.
His case is not unique. And the numbers handled by the INE seem to confirm that the phenomenon is stable. For example, because the number of international immigrants aged 15 to 34 to one Spanish province or another reflects the evident closeness in the figure between Madrid (113,000) and Barcelona (98,000) despite the 5.5 million inhabitants of the Barcelona province compared to to the nearly seven from Madrid. It thus represents a greater volume in relation to its population for Barcelona than for Madrid. Again.
And there is more: immigration from abroad by municipality in 2022 was 96,895 in the case of Barcelona, which represents 5.85% of the city’s population of 1.6 million. In Madrid 150,550, which represents about 4.51% compared to its population of 3.3 million.
More: Barcelona attracts more immigrant population from high-income places than Madrid, 77,000 compared to 68,000, as this newspaper published a few days ago, and these, in addition, are concentrated where there is more population with higher education, on the diagonal that goes from Vila Olímpica to Sarrià and its surroundings. The INE, furthermore, corroborates that Barcelona leads the percentage of the population that has higher education among the main cities in the country, reaching 47% for the population aged 16 or over. Madrid reaches 45%. The rest of the main cities move away.
Yoann Groleau, a Frenchman from near Nantes, an industrial engineer, is the director of the automotive division of the consulting firm Capgemini Engineering. He is 48 years old and has been from Barcelona for more than twenty years. He arrived in 2002 expatriated by the company – “I didn’t look for him; “I didn’t know Barcelona” – with the aim of integrating and developing the purchase of several local companies. And here he continues, in the “European California”, as he sees it, which highlights its tech atmosphere (which he now also sees on a smaller scale in Malaga), its “open” character and “quality of life”. Groleau, of course, compares past and present and ditches: “The change makes me sad. I tried to integrate, speak Spanish and Catalan, because it is logical, I am the one who came. Now many do not make the effort, they speak in English and they could be here as in Slovenia.”
“The profile of the qualified international migrant is increasingly varied and the origins are very diverse. There are Europeans, although in recent years the population with university studies from Latin America has also grown a lot. For example, from Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela,” López-Gay continues.
Estefanía Gordillo is 27 years old, from Bogotá, Colombia, and arrived in Barcelona four years ago for a university internship in audiovisual communication. She had a friend in town and he helped her. Later she started a master’s degree in cultural management, and with the covid, she stayed. She started working as a community manager at the OneCoWork coworking, very close to the cathedral, where there are many others and where she serves this newspaper. She mainly uses English in her daily life, she sits next to a bar that resembles that of a bar so that clients can share leisure time and she is apparently surrounded by thirty-something youth except for just a couple of clients. And there she is still after two years of seeing many pass by. She highlights that the Catalan capital is a city that is very enjoyable as a young person, “but I don’t know if I will stay, it is difficult to make long-term relationships, there are many who come and go,” she expresses.
And Zapata-Barrero, what’s more, adds: “As consequences of this phenomenon, pressure on rent is usually cited, because there are many better salaries than those here, which increases prices. Furthermore, public space, sociodemographically, changes. The other day I felt like I was in Amsterdam instead of in the center of Barcelona with a waiter who spoke neither Catalan nor Spanish.” On the contrary, it values their capabilities, which represent opportunities for companies and/or to generate new entrepreneurs, etc.
Because in Iese’s MBA classes in Barcelona, 85% of the total 750 students are foreigners. The writer saw similar percentages in journalism before the 2008 financial crisis and in economic history after the crisis broke out at the University of Barcelona.
Justin Varilek is 35 years old, he is from Iowa, United States, he studied international relations there with a specialty in Russia and has lived in the Eurasian giant, in Germany and in London until he decided with his partner to look at the map and go where they found “quality of life, international environment, that you can live in English and learn a useful language, there is good food, it has a startup environment…” He had a degree in communication and marketing, and now he works in the IT field and is a product owner from Barcelona for Spain and abroad. He also wants to stay for his son, “for at least seven years,” he says.
The parallel problem, however, is that Spain is also the place in Europe, according to Eurostat data, where there is the greatest overqualification for working people between 20 and 64 years old, whether looked at by country of birth or looked at by nationality. About 35% of employed people who were born in Spain are overqualified, but among foreigners it is about 45% among those born in another EU member country and it is above 50% for non-Europeans by birth.
Teresa Zerón is 40 years old, Mexican and a trained journalist. She has been in Barcelona since 2017, before she worked in the social chronicle in the Mexican capital, she was about to do a master’s degree in Cambridge and after the earthquake in Mexico City that year and pregnant, she came to Barcelona to write. “If not here, where,” she recites in reference to her image of “publishing capital.” After several jobs in the sector and a never-published novel, since 2020 she has run the Casi Esquina café in Vila Olímpica, where she likes to “live the neighborhood life.” Live lives in Poblenou, “guiriland, full of German digital nomads who come and go,” she says.
The lack of much detail in the available data on highly educated immigrants, however, raises more questions than answers, experts say. Also because the numbers of Spanish emigrants with higher education are nothing to write home about: it is estimated that some 100,000 people aged 25 or over and with higher education emigrated abroad in 2022, according to what Carlos Albert, from the Valencian Institute of Education, tells this newspaper. Economic Research (IVIE) and author of a report on it with the BBVA Foundation. They represented 30% of the total emigrants, 332,000 people.
Something doesn’t add up.
