Andrea González Henry is the president of the Youth Council of Spain and a Valencian in Madrid. She is 23 years old, she is a psychologist and she assures that she is not surprised that Madrid is the leader in attracting young people from other provinces in Spain. “Here it seems like no one is from Madrid,” she summarizes.
The numbers, however, go further, because according to the latest data from the National Statistics Institute (INE) with the year 2022 as a reference, if only 18 of the 52 Spanish provinces gain young people between 16 and 34 years old (barely a third ) due to interprovincial movements, Madrid is the only one that has more than 11,000, which means keeping half of the total positive balance.
“The current map looks like an updated version of the map of the rural exodus of the sixties, when there was a massive emigration from rural and southern Spain to urban and metropolitan Spain in the north, although with a notable difference: the hypertrophy of Madrid capital it increases,” Carles Freixa, an anthropologist at Pompeu Fabra University and a specialist in youth policies, summarizes to La Vanguardia.
And if in the sixties the destiny was shared with Barcelona and other large cities, now the Catalan capital continues to attract young people but weakly, and the Basque Country and Navarra disappear as centers of attraction. The province of Barcelona, third in the ranking, has about 3,000 young people between 16 and 34 years old, but with a population closer to that of Madrid (5.5 million compared to almost seven in the Madrid community), it means moving away – and a lot – of the latter. The second province that gains the most young people, in fact, is the Balearic Islands, also adding some 3,000 young people, a number very far from the 11,000 in Madrid although it is relevant in percentage terms with respect to its smaller population.
Madrid, thus, in absolute numbers, wins and wins by a landslide. Especially when most of the provinces that gain young people, only do so by incorporating a few hundred. And even more so when the provinces that lose the most young people are almost always from the south and destined for Madrid. On the one hand, Jaén stands out, with a negative balance of 2,865, a large figure compared to its population of about 600,000 inhabitants. Then follow Cádiz, Badajoz and Murcia, which each lose over 2,000 young people.
Madrid wins and wins by a landslide also because, in its case, "something happens that doesn't happen so much in Barcelona: part of the metropolitan region of Madrid are municipalities that are almost included in Madrid," says Antonio López-Gay, director of the Center d 'Studis Demogràfics. This includes, for example, two provinces close to the capital such as Toledo and Guadalajara, which also add young people to their population due to interprovincial movements.
And Laura Díaz Chorne, from the Official College of Political Scientists and Sociologists in Madrid, warns: “This phenomenon must in fact be greater than what the data reflects because a good part of the young people who travel to study do not drop out of school. register, nor to register in their new residence, since it is not necessary even to receive health care.”
All of this, it is indicated, is a long-standing phenomenon and has to do with globalization, metropolization and the interurban exodus that concentrates technological, financial and high-value-added services in large cities and, with it, more qualified jobs, recite in one word or another all the experts consulted. And in Spain it would have occurred especially since the 90s and 2000s and would have worsened during the economic recession, in Madrid concentrating – as Chorne explains – above all scientific and technical, financial, communications professional areas in addition to those already present in power. political, while in Catalonia more industrial and manufacturing or agricultural.
Others will relate it, for this very reason, to the brain drain, indicating the important change that is taking place compared to what was seen decades ago: there is a shift from the movement of people with less training, from rural exodus, to one of more qualified people dominating.
Rubén Rodríguez, almost thirty-something, is a Basque economist who went to Madrid once he finished his degree, in the middle of the pandemic, to study a master's degree in Business Administration. He did it after studying another in Barcelona, online, about finance. Today he still lives in the Spanish capital, works in a consulting firm and does not think about returning. “In Bilbao there are not many opportunities…” he said years ago. With the facts he also reiterates it now.
In a first-year international business class at the Universitat de Vic-Universitat Central de Catalunya in Barcelona, for example, this course, of 40 students, almost all of them are Catalan, counting on two hands those who have origins in Europe or Latin America, but with only one finger those arriving from the rest of Spain, in this specific case from Castilla y León.
And it is no exception: in 2020, before the pandemic, it is known that Madrid already concentrated over 30% of students from other communities and Catalonia 10%. “The linguistic issue here has to play an important factor,” considers Chorne.
Freixa, further, considers that the unequal migratory map of young people within Spain is due, on the one hand, to the “neocentralism of Madrid”, which would have the radial structure of the AVE as a symbol “and which translates into the concentration of large companies and the new niches of the economy that young people in the capital are looking for, such as digital, which attracts the most educated and most dynamic young sector, the new qualified working class,” he recites. And on the other hand, it continues, after the pandemic, mass tourism on the islands, Valencia and Barcelona-Girona “has been reborn with force thanks to the precarious and temporary work of two types of youth: the migrant and the national, the new class of services not qualified.”
The slight increase in young people who see Barcelona, Valencia or the Balearic Islands seems to indicate this. And Henry will corroborate this with his own experience, indicating that “there is the feeling that everything is in Madrid and that everything goes through Madrid, while in other places there are not as many opportunities and jobs. In my circle there are also those who have studied Vocational Training and have found work in their environment, but at the university level it doesn't happen as much. In the third sector, which I know best, almost everything is here. Of course, then you arrive and you don't live so well either because of the distance between salaries and rents, for example. But in two hours by AVE you go from Valencia to Madrid, and with Barcelona, for example, it is already known that there are problems in the connection and it is not that good."
That's right: the Mediterranean corridor has not just closed.
All of this has consequences. There are those already seen about the accumulation of opportunities and population formed in a few geographical points. But there are others, as for example Asturias reflects, which is already the community with the lowest percentage of young people in its total population (with just over 125,000 between 19 and 25 years old, over 12%, according to Injuve), so that here “increasingly it is older people and people of Spanish nationality who are decisive” in politics, adds López-Gay.
If young people are the future, the map of Spain that reflects those territories that lose or gain them seems to indicate which ones win and lose in that future, and the absolute winner seems, for now, once again, Madrid.
