It was barely a minute past midnight on the 1st when Jacob, son of Liseth Manuela and Wilson David, was born in La Seu d'Urgell. And an hour and a half later, in Manresa, Inass, daughter of Rachah and Abderahim, became the first girl to be born in Catalonia in 2024. When the name and origin of the parents became known, the networks they were filled with xenophobic comments and racist arguments about whether or not they should be considered the first Catalans of the year.
The reality is that Jacob and Inass are the confirmation of the new demographic profile of Catalonia, where, due to aging and the drop in the birth rate, the population has long been growing only due to the arrival of foreigners (already are 16% of the population), three out of ten women of childbearing age come from other countries, and their birth rate (measured in number of births per thousand inhabitants) is two and a half times higher than that of women born in Spain. The consequence is that the relative weight of births to foreign mothers continues to grow and they already represent a third of the total.
"It's not that more children are being born to foreigners than 10 or 15 years ago, what's happening is that births to native mothers have plummeted, so the proportion of babies born to foreign mothers is growing and this feeds the idea that only children of immigrants are born", explains the director of the Center for Demographic Studies (CED), Albert Esteve.
He assures that immigrants living in Catalonia do not have many more children than the natives. Its fertility rate measured in children per woman is not far off: 1.39 among foreign women and 1.12 among Spanish nationals. "Foreign women's fertility is not rocket science, they do not at least reach the level of generational replacement (2.1 children per woman), what is happening is that the generation of Spanish women in their thirties, when it would be time to have children , it is a very empty generation: they are few and with minimal fertility", says Esteve.
According to the INE birth data corresponding to Catalonia, in 2022 5.8 babies were born for every thousand inhabitants of Spanish nationality, and 14.15 for every thousand foreigners. Ten years earlier, in 2012, these rates were 8.75 and 19.6, respectively, which confirms Esteve's argument: the drop in the birth rate also affects immigrants, who increasingly have fewer children, but their weight on the set of births grows because the native birth rate is at a minimum.
The global fertility rate, which measures births per thousand women, shows the same evolution: in the last decade it has dropped from 58.23 to 44.18 among foreign women, and from 39.24 to 28.37 among spanish In addition, Catalonia now has lower fertility rates than the Spanish average among both the native and foreign population, which was not the case in 2012. Statistics also indicate that foreign women are encouraged to have children at older ages earlier than Spanish women, which increases the chances of having one or being mothers more than once. In Catalonia, foreign women who had children in 2022 were on average 2.4 years younger than Spanish women.
"For many years we have been in a demographic situation that is leading us to population decline due to natural dynamics; what happens is that the situation was masked because when the baby boom generation reached the age of becoming parents, since there were many of them, even if they had few children, we saw the number of births grow; it did until 2008, but now the opposite is happening and two trends favoring the decrease of the native population are added: they continue to have few children and there are few candidates to be fathers or mothers because few generations of people are of childbearing age ”, emphasizes the director of the Center for Demographic Studies.
And he points out that it will be necessary to wait ten or fifteen years, for those born between 2000 and 2008 to reach their thirties, "when there was a mini baby boom", to see if the trend is broken and the birth rate increases slightly in Catalonia and Spain. The number of births in Catalonia in 2022 – the last financial year for which definitive data is available – was the lowest since 1996. 56,344 were registered, 2.2% less than in 2021, and the number of newborns decrease to 27 of the 42 counties that existed at that time. The biggest declines were recorded in the Conca de Barberà (-16.7%), Alta Ribargorça (-15%) and Berguedà (12.1%), according to Idescat data.
