Andrea González Henry is the president of the Spanish Youth Council and a Valencian in Madrid. She is 23 years old, she is a psychologist and she says that she is not surprised that Madrid is the leader in attracting young people from other provinces of Spain. "Here it seems that no one is from Madrid", he sums up.
The numbers, however, go further, because according to the latest data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) with the year 2022 as a reference, if only 18 of the 52 Spanish provinces gain young people between 16 and 34 years (barely a third) for interprovincial movements, Madrid is the only one that adds up to more than 11,000, which means that it has 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 northern Spain, although with a notable difference : the hypertrophy of the capital Madrid is increasing", summarizes Carles Freixa in La Vanguardia, Pompeu Fabra University anthropologist and youth specialist.
If in the sixties the destination was shared with Barcelona and other big cities, now the Catalan capital continues to attract young people, but in a weak way, and the Basque Country and Navarre are disappearing as centers of attraction. The province of Barcelona, third in the ranking, has around 3,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 34, but with a population closer to that of Madrid (5.5 million compared to almost 7 in the Madrid community), it is I know - and a lot - about the latter. The second province that gains the most young people, in fact, is the Balearic Islands, also with around 3,000 young people, which is a significant percentage compared to its much smaller population.
Madrid, in absolute numbers, wins, and wins by thrashing. More than most of the provinces that gain young people, they only incorporate a few hundred. The provinces that lose the most young people are, for their part, Jaén, with a negative balance of 2,865, and Cádiz, Badajoz and Murcia, which lose nearly 2,000 young people each.
Madrid wins and wins by a landslide also because, in its case, "something happens that doesn't happen so much in Barcelona: part of its metropolitan region are municipalities that are almost included in Madrid", says Antonio López-Gay, director of the Center for Demographic Studies. This includes, for example, two nearby provinces 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 Politicians and Sociologists in Madrid, warns: "This phenomenon must in fact be greater than the data reflect, because a large part of the young people who travel for studies do not realize go off the register, or register at your new residence, since it is not even necessary to receive health care”.
All this, it is indicated, is a phenomenon that has been around for a long time and has to do with globalization and metropolisation that concentrates technological, financial activities and high added value services in the big cities and, with this, more jobs qualified, recite with a few words or other all the experts consulted. And in Spain it would have taken place especially since the 1990s and it would have intensified during the economic recession; in Madrid concentrating – as Chorne explains – mainly scientific and technical professional areas, financial, communications in addition to those already present in political power, while in Catalonia, rather industrial and manufacturing or agricultural. Others can relate it, for this very reason, to the brain drain.
Rubén Rodríguez, almost thirty years old, 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 left after having studied another in Barcelona, online, on finance. Today he still lives in the Spanish capital, works in a consulting firm and has no plans to return. "There aren't many opportunities in Bilbao...", he used to say years ago. He also reiterates it now with the facts.
In a first-year class in International Business at the University of Vic in Barcelona, for example, this year, of about forty students, almost all of whom are Catalan, the Europeans or Latin Americans can be counted on two hands, but with one finger the arrivals from the rest of Spain, in this case from Castilla-La Mancha.
And it is not an exception: in 2020, before the pandemic, it is known that Madrid already had close to 30% of students from other communities and Catalonia, 10%. "The linguistic question must play an important factor here", considers Chorne. Freixa considers that the uneven migration 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 results in the concentration of the big companies and the new market veins of the economy that young people are looking for in the capital, such as digital, which attracts the most educated and most dynamic young sector, the new qualified working class", he says. And on the other hand, he continues, to the fact that after the pandemic, mass tourism in the islands, Valencia and Barcelona-Girona "has been strongly reborn thanks to the precarious and temporary work of two classes of youth: the migrant and national, the new class of unqualified services”.
The slight increase in young people who see Barcelona, Valencia or the Balearic Islands seems to indicate this. And Henry will corroborate it with his own experience: "There is the feeling that everything is in Madrid and everything happens through Madrid, while in other places there are not so many opportunities. In my circle there are also those who have studied vocational training and have indeed found work in their environment, but not so much happens in the university field. In the third sector, which I know best, almost everything is here. And in two hours with the AVE you go from Valencia to Madrid, and with Barcelona, for example, it is already known that there are problems with the connection and it is not that good".
That's right: the Mediterranean corridor has not yet closed.
All this has consequences. There are the already seen about the accumulation of opportunities and population formed in a few points of the geography. But there are others, such as the case of Asturias, which is already the community with the smallest percentage of young people in its population (with just over 125,000 between 19 and 25 years old, close to a 12%, according to Injuve), so that here "increasingly the elderly and of Spanish nationality are the ones who are decisive" in politics, adds López-Gay.
If young people are the future, the map of Spain that reflects the territories that lose or gain them seems to indicate which territories gain and lose the future, and the absolute winner seems, for now, once again, Madrid.
