Catalonia is the Spanish autonomous community that welcomed the most migrants, Spanish and foreign, between 2017 and 2021, according to a study by the TBS-Eduacation Barcelona business school. Specifically, the region hosted more than 100,000 people each year during this period.
The main profile of the people who arrive and settle in Catalonia is young individuals, between 15 and 29 years old, while the less frequent includes people over 60. These same patterns are repeated throughout Spain. The fact that before 2019 more foreign men than women migrated to Spain is also remarkable. However, since that year the trend has been reversed.
Despite this, Catalonia is not the autonomous community where migration is growing the most. In this sense, the regions with the highest migratory growth, national and international, during these years have been Murcia, Andalusia and the Valencian Community. On the other side of the list are the Canary Islands, the Basque Country and the Balearic Islands.
Although Catalonia is the autonomous community that receives the most people, in the period analyzed by this study it is observed that there has been a 15% annual drop in the number of arrivals of foreign migrants, especially between 2019 and 2020 due to the pandemic. However, it seems that these numbers started to pick up between 2020 and 2021.
With these figures, Catalonia surpasses other communities such as Madrid, the Valencian Community, Andalusia and the Canary Islands. The sum of these five regions accounts for 74% of the total migratory movements in Spain, which in turn is the second country in the European Union in number of migrants per year, only behind Germany and far ahead of other countries such as France, Italy or the Netherlands, as detailed in the text.
For Dr. Edgar Sánchez, collaborating professor at TBS-Eduacation Barcelona, the impact of these migratory flows is multifactorial. On the one hand, Sánchez explains that "on an economic level it can mean more workers, poverty and demand. On a social level, it brings greater ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity." However, on the other hand, he adds that "at the political level, for example, it fosters the rise and development of anti-migration ideologies; and in international politics it can influence bilateral relations between nations."
Regarding internal migration, that is, between autonomous communities, between 2017 and 2019 there was a 41% increase in migration between regions. However, with the confinement and restrictions due to the pandemic, this figure fell and has not yet returned to the levels prior to 2020. Despite not being the fastest growing, Madrid and Catalonia continue to be the preferred communities for Spanish migrants.
