1.3 The emmigration of foreign workers to spain: a new and relevant  (Page 5/8)

Spain for the first time in its history: change from an emitting to receiving country of immigrants

The increase of immigration in Spain has been happening at a remarkable rate, mainly in the last four years, as it can be seen in the graph in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Evolution of the resident of foreign population in Spain.

Source : National Institute of Statistics (NIS). 2005

The total number of immigrants regularized at the beginning of 2005 was 3,691,547, which entails 8.4% of the 40 million Spanish populations. It would be necessary to add the people regularized during the first months of 2005, which would be about 4 million regularized immigrants, and an undetermined number of undocumented people, who some estimate at about half a million.

Immigrants concentrate themselves mainly in 5 of the 17 autonomous communities in Spain. Madrid and Catalonia have just about half of all immigrants, and if the following are added, the Valencia Community, Andalusia, and the Canary Islands, it would add up to 80% of all immigrants in Spain.

According to Figure 2, immigrants of American nationalities are the greatest contingent of 1,460,176 regularized people, which almost adds to 40% of all foreigners, exactly 39.6%. Of these, Ecuador is the greatest national group of Latin American immigrants (491,797), which is 13.3% of the total population of immigrants. Following it is Colombia, with 268,931 (7.3% of the total number of immigrants), Argentina with 151,878 (4.7%), Bolivia with 96,844 (2.6%), and Peru with 84,427 (2.3% of the total number of immigrants) in Spain.

Figure 2. Resident foreigners in Spain by areas of origin.

Source: National Institute of Statistics (NIS). 2005

The second group, by nationalities, would be the Europeans with 1,336,214 foreigners, (36.2% of the total immigrants). From the European Union (25 countries), 766,678 (20.8%) of the total foreigners are in Spain, surpassing the United Kingdom (224,841 foreigners) and Germany (131,887). And 561,476 are foreigners of other European countries (15.2% of the total number of immigrants), the most numerous being Romania with 314,349 (8.5% of the total number of immigrants), followed by Bulgaria with 91,339 (2.5%). African nationalities would be the third group, with 705,944 (19.1% of the total number of foreigners); Morocco being the most numerous national group with 505,373, again surpassing Ecuador (491,797), and representing 13.7% of the total of foreigners in Spain. There are 186,227 foreigners of Asian nationalities (5.0% of the total number of foreigners), the Chinese being the most numerous with 86,681 immigrants, adding to 2.3% of the total number of immigrants. In Oceania there are 2,284 foreigners (0.1% of immigration). (See Table 1 and Figure 3).

Table 1. foreigners in spain according to nationality, to january 1, 2005