Much more numerous, diverse and older. That is the conclusion that is drawn about what the population of Catalonia is like when the first x-ray taken by the Center d'Estudis Demogràfics (CED), which has just turned 40 years old, is compared with the current one.
From the report presented yesterday by its current director, Albert Esteve, during the institutional event organized to celebrate these four decades of the organization, it is concluded that, if in 1984 Catalonia had just under six million inhabitants, with an average age of 35.2 years and a percentage of foreigners less than 2%, today there are more than eight million residents, with an average age of 43.4 years and more than 21% born in other countries.
“The great surprise about the demographic evolution of these four decades is having reached eight million; “No one expected to reach that volume of population, it was not a figure that appeared in the predictions,” explains Albert in conversation with La Vanguardia.
And it emphasizes that this strong expansion occurs in a context in which more people die than are born, with several years in a row of negative natural growth. “It was only from 2020-2021, after seeing the arrival of many people in the 2019 migration data, when the projections were redone; and the most recent data indicate that we can continue growing for at least a few more years thanks to immigration because more people arrive than leave,” says Albert, who is also a professor of Sociology at the UAB.
And this immigration that has propelled the jump from six to eight million inhabitants is also the reason for the greater diversity in origin and social capital of the current Catalan population compared to what existed when the UAB and the Generalitat created the CED.
Two-thirds of those registered in 2021 are immigrants or descendants of immigrants. “And if we look at the third generation, three out of every four Catalans would be a direct or indirect product of immigration in the 20th and 21st centuries, because they have a grandparent born outside of Catalonia,” Esteve details in his report.
Specifically, of the 7.8 million people registered in Catalonia in 2021, 2.8 million (35.9%) were born outside this community: 1.18 million in other Spanish autonomies and the rest abroad. Only in the mid-1970s had a higher percentage of people born outside Catalonia been registered (38.4% in the 1975 census).
Regarding the origin of the registered foreigners, practically 45% are Latin American, 22% are European, 21% African and 11% Asian, although if one looks at the country of birth it stands out that 15% of all those born abroad come from Morocco. The other two largest communities are Colombian (6.8%) and Argentine (5.5%).
This immigration is not distributed equally. It is mainly concentrated in the metropolitan area of Barcelona and in municipalities with a high demand for labour. In Guissona, which concentrates the agri-food processing industry, practically half of the population (49.2%) is foreign. It is followed by Castelló d'Empúries (47%) and La Jonquera (44.3%).
The third big change that is observed when comparing who lived in Catalonia in the 80s and now is aging. On average, practically one in five residents is over 65 years old, but in large areas of the interior of Lleida and Tarragona they are one in four. In 1984, they were only 11.6% of the population.
On the other hand, the relative weight of children and adolescents has gone from 23.2% then to 15.5% in 2022, although in more than a fifth of Catalan municipalities those under 16 years of age do not even represent 12 % of those registered.
“It is the chronicle of an aging that has been announced; We knew that the population of Catalonia was aging because people are living longer and because fertility has been at rock bottom since the 80s; and now that fewer people of fertile age have coincided and have few children, the number of births will continue to decrease in the coming years, and the weight of those born to a foreign mother or father will increase, because the weight of immigration in the age groups in which children are born is higher than in the population as a whole,” explains the director of the CED.
And he adds that, looking to the future, the evolution of Catalonia's population will fundamentally depend on how international immigration behaves because no surprises are expected in terms of fertility or aging.
“The challenge for the rulers is to manage this large volume of diverse population, because organizing the housing, logistics, transportation, consumption or health needs for six million people is not the same as for eight, not even if those eight were born here. "They do have different social capital structures and priorities because their origins are unequal," concludes the UAB sociologist.
