On Friday afternoons, Barcelona's beaches are teeming with both locals and foreigners taking advantage of sunny (even chilly) days to play volleyball. On any weekday, the center of the Catalan capital is bustling with young expats working remotely. Some of them, who coincidentally share a coworking space near the cathedral, explain: “I came here as an expatriate,” quotes Andrew McGarvey, a 33-year-old Scot; “I came for university internships,” adds Estefanía Gordillo, a 27-year-old Colombian; “I came for the entrepreneurial environment,” recounts Justin Varilek, a 35-year-old American. All three have higher education degrees. They all embody a trend with significant implications: Barcelona is becoming a hub for attracting qualified international talent compared to Madrid, the other major magnet for foreign migration to Spain.
According to Antonio López-Gay, director of the Centre for Demographic Studies, as reported by La Vanguardia, in 2022 (the latest available data), the city of Barcelona attracted around 40,000 foreigners with higher education degrees and 10,000 from other provinces in Spain; Madrid attracted about 40,000 foreigners with the same level of education and 30,000 from Spain. Barcelona, therefore, attracts the same number of qualified individuals from abroad as Madrid, but with half the population.
Because Madrid and Barcelona are, no matter how you look at it, the two main migration hubs in Spain. However, today, while the Spanish capital is the main protagonist in internal migrations and, for example, captures half of all the positive balance of internal movements of young people between 16 and 34 years old, the picture changes regarding the incorporation of foreign and qualified population. In this aspect, the Catalan capital stands out.
Details are still being worked out, quotes López-Gay, because “flow data is subject to a confidentiality agreement,” he adds. Even the National Statistics Institute (INE) delves into the nebulous 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, “indeed, the majority of them are between 25 and 39 years old and we do not have data on their level of education,” he explains.
And in response to this, Ricard Zapata-Barrero, director of the interdisciplinary research group on immigration at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, states that “I am unaware of the causes. There are people from the global north and global south who are settling here. In other countries, there are policies to attract them, but not here, and people come anyway. I understand that it is a young profile, around 30 years old, and often they are people from the digital field who have it easier, so we should look into who provides the income beyond those designated by multinational companies with specific profiles. Many questions arise and few answers, although it is a very consolidated issue,” he insists.
Andrew McGarvey is a 33-year-old Scot from near Glasgow. He studied computer science and business. He works in his family's human resources company, focused on the UK financial sector, and does so from Barcelona, telecommuting, only attending there for occasional meetings. However, he arrived in Barcelona when he was working for HP as a computer scientist. “They told me they were opening an office here and that I could go. The perfect option,” he comments. He has been there for 10 years already and plans to stay. He is drawn to the climate as much as to the international atmosphere or the fact that not everything is “working during the week and only living on weekends as it happens in Scotland. Here I am very active.” Moreover, his group of friends is very international, starting with his partner, a Peruvian nurse trained in Catalonia, he explains.
Your case is not unique. And the numbers provided by the INE seem to confirm that the phenomenon is stable. For example, the number of international immigrants aged 15 to 34 to a Spanish province transfers the evident proximity in the figure between Madrid (113,000) and Barcelona (98,000), despite the 5.5 million inhabitants of the Barcelona province compared to the nearly seven million of the Madrid region. This implies a greater volume in relation to its population for Barcelona than for Madrid. Once again.
And there's more: the number of immigrants from abroad by municipality in 2022 was 96,895 in Barcelona, representing 5.85% of the city's population of 1.6 million. In Madrid, it was 150,550, representing around 4.51% compared to its population of 3.3 million.
Moreover, Barcelona attracts more immigrant population from high-income areas than Madrid, 77,000 compared to 68,000, as reported by this newspaper a few days ago. Furthermore, these individuals tend to concentrate where there is a higher population with higher education, along the diagonal that goes from Vila Olímpica to Sarrià and its surroundings. The INE also confirms that Barcelona leads in the percentage of population with higher education among the main cities of the country, reaching nearly 47% for the population aged 16 and over. Madrid stands at 45%. The rest of the main cities fall behind.
Yoann Groleau, a French native from near Nantes, an industrial engineer, is the director of the automotive division at Capgemini Engineering. He is 48 years old and has been a resident of Barcelona for over twenty years. He arrived in 2002 as an expatriate for the company - “I didn't seek it out; I didn't know Barcelona,” he says - with the aim of integrating and developing the acquisition of several local companies. And here he is, in the “European California,” as he sees it, highlighting its tech environment (which he now also sees on a smaller scale in Malaga), its “open” character, and “quality of life.” Groleau, however, compares the past and the present and concludes: “The change saddens me. I tried to integrate, speak Spanish and Catalan, because it's logical, I'm the one who came here. Now many don't make the effort, they speak in English and could be here as in Slovenia.”
“The profile of the skilled international migrant is becoming increasingly diverse, with origins from a wide range of places. There are Europeans, although in recent years, there has also been significant growth in the population with college degrees coming from Latin America. 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 the city who helped her. Later, she started a master's degree in cultural management, and due to the Covid situation, she stayed. She began working as a community manager at the OneCoWork coworking space, very close to the cathedral, where there are many others and where she assists this newspaper. She mainly uses English in her daily life, sits next to a bar that resembles a bar for customers to share leisure time, and is surrounded by seemingly thirty-something youths except for just a couple of clients. And there she remains after two years, watching many come and go. She highlights that Barcelona is a city that young people enjoy a lot, “but I don't know if I will stay, it's hard to form lasting relationships, there are many who come and go,” she says.
And Zapata-Barrero goes even further, adding: “As a consequence of this phenomenon, the pressure on rental prices is often cited, as there are more higher wages than here, which increases prices. In addition, the public space, in terms of sociodemographics, changes. The other day I felt like I was in Amsterdam instead of in the center of Barcelona with a waiter who didn't speak Catalan or Spanish.” On the flip side, it highlights their skills, which represent opportunities for companies and/or for creating new entrepreneurs, and so on.
In the MBA classes at IESE in Barcelona, 85% of the total 750 students are foreigners. The writer observed similar percentages in journalism before the 2008 financial crisis and in economic history after the crisis erupted at the University of Barcelona.
Justin Varilek is 35 years old, from Iowa, United States. He studied international relations with a focus on Russia, and has lived in the Eurasian giant, Germany, and London before deciding with his partner to look at the map and go where they could find “quality of life, an international environment, where you can live in English and learn a useful language, have good food, and a startup atmosphere...” He has a background in communication and marketing, and now works in the IT field as a product owner in Barcelona for Spain and beyond. He also wants to stay for his son, “at least for seven years,” he says.
The parallel problem, however, is that Spain is also the European country where there is a higher rate of overqualification for workers aged 20 to 64, whether looked at by country of birth or nationality, according to data from Eurostat. Close to 35% of employed individuals born in Spain are overqualified, but among foreigners, the rate rises to around 45% for those born in another EU country and exceeds 50% for non-EU born individuals.
Teresa Zerón is 40 years old, Mexican, and a journalist by training. She has been in Barcelona since 2017; before that, she worked in the social chronicle in the Mexican capital. She was on the verge of doing a master's in Cambridge but, after the earthquake in Mexico City that year and being pregnant, she arrived in Barcelona to write. “If not here, where,” she recites, referring to her image of an “editorial capital.” After several jobs in the sector and an unpublished novel, since 2020 she owns the Casi Esquina café in Vila Olímpica, where she enjoys “living the neighborhood life.” She lives in Poblenou, “guirilandia, full of German digital nomads coming and going,” she exclaims.
The lack of many details in the available data on immigrants with higher education generates more questions than answers, experts point out. This is also because the numbers of Spanish emigrants with higher education are not particularly impressive: it is estimated that around 100,000 people aged 25 or older with higher education emigrated abroad in 2022, as specified to this newspaper by Carlos Albert, from the Valencian Institute of Economic Research (IVIE) and author of a report on this issue with the BBVA Foundation. They represented 30% of the total emigrants, 332,000 people.
Something doesn't add up.
