Economic crisis and internal migration of foreign-born in Spain

Joaquin Recaño Valverde, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Spain, a country of emigration for decades, has rapidly become one of the world’s main countries of immigration. In January 2013, Spain hosted 6.6 million foreign-born persons, according to the population register; they represented 14.1 per cent of the total population of Spain. This paper describes the repercussion of the change in the economic cycle on the internal migration of the foreign-born population in Spain, adding an approximation into the recent flows of immigration, their settlement processes in the territory and their subsequent internal/domestic geographic mobility. In sum, it consists of an analysis of all the migratory processes, which are taken into account as an interrelated unit, which responds to the recent economic situations, that are radically different from those experimented during last decade, when the immigration boom and the redistribution of the foreign population along the territory coincided with a phase of continuous economic expansion. This paper describe the internal mobility of the foreign-born population in the recent times of crisis, identifying the new socio-demographic and territorial factors that explain it, dedicating a special attention to residential mobility and also the mobility that is related to the work market and closely associated to those movements of medium and large distance, so as to observe which migratory processes consolidate and which ones revert. The study of all these differentiated processes by nationality/place of birth will be, at all time, compared to what happens with the Spanish population, which will be considered as the group of reference. The analysis is based on data from the Population Register Microdata files (Residential Variation Statistics) and the Padron Continuo which provide information on individuals changing place of residence by basic demographic characteristics (citizenship, age, gender, country of birth and origin and destination of internal migration) for the period 1998-2012 and the population at risk.