With the economic globalisation that coincided with the new millennium, migration flows accelerated, rose in volume and diversified. In Catalonia, as in the rest of Spain, this growth represented the first boom in international migration, from 2000 to 2007. Labour market demand during economic expansion, combined with the demand produced by outsourcing part of reproductive labour (domestic work and care of children and the elderly), largely explains this extraordinary increase in volume and acceleration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The explosive rise in demand was driven both by a production model based on low value-added, employment-intensive economic sectors (from those related to tourism, particularly the hotel and catering industry, to agriculture and construction) and by demographic changes, notably greater life expectancy, education of younger generations, especially women, and the large-scale incorporation of women into the labour market. However, it was also motivated by political reasons: a weak welfare state challenged by neo-liberal doctrine. In terms of diversity, there are other types of migration besides purely economic: refugees; students and immigrants attracted by the property market; the consumption of the landscape and quality of life by such groups as retirees from richer countries and speculative investors; multinational workers; and digital nomads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The novelty and magnitude of these flows contributed to the transformation of the labour market, mainly through its dualisation and deregulation, but they also put already deficient public services to the test, starting with schools, and health and social services in general. They led to the questioning of integration models, in response to which several narratives arose in relation to their consequences: the balance between cost and benefit, ethno-cultural diversity, its management, the impact on social cohesion and national identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With the second migratory boom, from 2014 to the present, after the experience of the Great Recession of 2008-2013 and the crisis caused by the COVID-19, Catalonia completed the leap from 6 million inhabitants, at which it had stagnated in the last quarter of the 20th century, to 8 million in 2023, a substantial part of which was due to migration \u2013 just over 3 million new residents registered in 23 years \u2013 which, after return and onward emigration movements, resulted in 1.9 million foreign-born residents in 2024. This figure brought the country\u2019s international immigrant population to 23.8% of the total, comparable to Canada or New Zealand, among countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Without the contribution of net migration (immigration minus emigration), the population would have dripped after 2016 due to natural decrease (the difference between births and deaths). This dizzying change, the experience of the recession and growing precarity and inequality, all of which has provoked acute social unrest, explain why migration narratives have become polarised in Catalonia and around the world, and are one of the central causes of political conflict. Political polarisation challenges the hegemonic discourse of interculturality. What can demography contribute to the debate?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unlike in Spain as a whole, immigration was nothing new for Catalonia. During the 20th century, it experienced two waves of migration from the rest of Spain: the first, from 1910 to the Great Crash of 1929, followed by the collapse aggravated by the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939); and the second, from the 1950s to 1976, brought to an end by the oil crisis, coinciding with the baby boom (1956-1976). Both waves shaped the demographic, economic and social history of the country. Let us now look only at the demographics (Figure 1).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Catalonia, like France as a whole and a few other European regions, was an exception in the demographic transition, which involved a switch from an old demographic model, based on high fertility and mortality, with little or no population growth, to a post-transitional one, with low mortality and fertility. This exceptionality was not so much in the chronology, which in Catalonia we can date to between the end of the 19th century and the 1930s, but in the fact that fertility began to fall early in relation to mortality. The latter remained relatively high at the beginning of the process, unlike most European countries and regions, where there was an initial fall in mortality followed later by a fall in fertility, leading to strong population growth. The reasons for this exception are still a matter for debate. Whatever the case, it meant that natural increase remained weak and that, with industrialisation, the pull factor of migration, due to the relative scarcity of young people entering the labour market, was at least as important or more so than the push factor of expulsion from immigrants\u2019 regions of origin. This internal driving force has led some authors to speak of migration as an endogenous feature in Catalonia\u2019s demographic system. [1]<\/a>1 \u2014 Arango, J. (2007). \u201cLes primeres migracions del segle XX a Catalunya\u201d. In: Immigraci\u00f3. Les onades immigrat\u00f2ries en la Catalunya contempor\u00e0nia. Barcelona: Llu\u00eds Carulla Foundation, pp. 19-33 (Nadala; 41).\n<\/span><\/span> Thus, the 20th century anticipated what has occurred to a greater or lesser extent in all developed countries during the 21st century: the migration balance becoming the essential component of population growth, overtaking natural increase. To put it in technical terms: Catalonia has become a complex system of demographic reproduction. [2]<\/a>2 \u2014 Cabr\u00e9, A. (1999). El sistema catal\u00e0 de reproducci\u00f3. Barcelona: Proa.\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n