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IMMIGRATION

Nine in ten new residents in Spain’s Balearic Islands are foreign

Almost 90 percent of new residents in Spain's Balearic Islands are foreigners, data from the country's National Statistics Institute has revealed.

Published: 19 February 2024 10:41 CET
Nine in ten new residents in Spain's Balearic Islands are foreign
Tourists sunbathe at Magaluf Beach in Calvia, on the Balearic Island of Mallorca. Photo: JAIME REINA/AFP.

85 percent of new residents settling in the Balearic Islands are foreigners. This is according to new data from Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE), which recently published its Estadística Continua de Población (ECP) with provisional data as of January 1st 2024.

The most eye-catching figures show that the islands continue to grow in population, with over 1.2 million people now officially resident in the Balearics. A total 337,948 of that number are foreigners, INE figures show, and of the 21,581 new residents that arrived in 2023, only 3,339 were born in Spain, meaning that 85 percent of the new residents on the islands were foreigners.

Foreign born people make up over a quarter (27.4 percent) of the total population of the islands, the highest figure in Spain.

READ ALSO: Moving to Spain’s Balearics: Which island is right for you?

The Balearic Islands have long been home to a significant migrant population, many of them traditionally second home owners who split their time between countries. However, historically the bulk of these people were other Europeans, namely Germans, French and Britons, when the UK was in the EU.

But now the profile of migrants arriving in the Balearics seems to be changing somewhat. Of the over 21,000 residents that came in 2023, 14,000 of them hail from one of three countries, none of the European: Colombia, Argentina and Morocco. In other words, almost 7 out of every 10 new residents in the Balearics are Colombian, Argentinian or Moroccan.

Last year 6,720 Colombians arrived in the Balearics, a third of all new arrivals. 3,950 Argentinians emigrated to the Islands, and slightly fewer, 3,330, came from Morocco.

The INE figures only list the three largest migrant groups per region, so the annual fluctuations in resident numbers of nationalities that have traditionally settled in the Balearics, namely Germans and UK nationals, isn’t entirely clear yet. There are reportedly 8,000 British second home owners in Menorca alone, with 2,053 British residents living on the island.

READ ALSO: Second home owners on Spain’s Menorca left in limbo over lack of UK flights

Zooming out and looking at the national picture, however, it seems the rise in Colombians, Argentinians and Moroccans is in keeping with nationwide migratory trends, with the three groups leading INE figures across the country.

During the fourth quarter of 2023 the population grew in all regions of Spain, except in Andalusia and Extremadura. The largest increases occurred in the autonomous city of Melilla (0.64 percent), Madrid (0.44 percent), and the Valencian Community (0.41 percent). In the Balearic Islands population grew 0.13 percent in the final quarter of the year.

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PENSIONS

Spain needs 25 million foreign workers to keep its pensions afloat

As the retirement of baby boomers looms, Spain's ageing population and declining birth rate mean the country will need millions of foreign workers to maintain its public pension pot and reinforce the labour market, the Bank of Spain has warned.

Published: 2 May 2024 09:46 CEST
Spain needs 25 million foreign workers to keep its pensions afloat

A recent study by the Bank of Spain estimates that the country will need up to 25 million more immigrant workers by 2053 in order to combat demographic ageing and maintain the ratio of workers to pensioners in order to support the pension system.

Without an influx of more foreign workers or sudden increase in the birth rate in Spain, something that seems very unlikely, experts fear that the growing disparity between working age people and pensioners could put the public pensions system in danger in the medium to long-term.

Like in many countries in the western world, the Spanish population is ageing, with the percentage of the population over 65 years of age predicted to peak in 2050, when almost one in three will be 65 years old or older.

READ ALSO: Spain’s over 65s exceed 20 percent of the population for the first time

By 2035 around one in four (26.0 percent) of Spaniards are expected to be 65 or older. That figure is currently around one fifth of the population.

Furthermore, this is compounded by falling birth rates. Spain’s birth rate hit a record low in 2023, falling to its lowest level since records began, according to INE data. Spain’s fertility rate is the second lowest in the European Union, with Eurostat figures showing there were just 1.19 births per woman in Spain in 2021, compared with 1.13 in Malta and 1.25 in Italy.

If nothing changes, the current ratio of 3.8 people of working age for every pensioner is predicted to plummet to just 2.1 by 2053, according to INE projections.

Maintaining this ratio seems unlikely moving forward, according to the report’s conclusions, something that would put pressure on pensions without significantly increasing social security contributions among working age people.

READ ALSO: Older and more diverse: What Spain’s population will be like in 50 years

The Bank of Spain report noted that “immigrants have high labour participation rates, generally above those of natives – in 2022, 70 percent and 56.5 percent, respectively.”

In three decades’ time, the INE expects Spain to have 14.8 million pensioners, 18 million Spanish nationals of working age and 12 million foreigners. To maintain the ratio, the Bank of Spain forecasts that the working immigrant population would have to rise by more than 25 million to a total of 37 million overall.

Of course, the arrival of 25 million working-age foreigners seems unlikely, if not impossible. To achieve this, around 1 million net migrants would have to enter Spain each year (discounting departures), a figure unprecedented in recent history. To put the figure in context, between 2002 and 2022 net arrivals in Spain reached five million, roughly five times less than what would be necessary to maintain the balance between workers and pensioners.

READ ALSO: ‘Homologación’ – How Spain is ruining the careers of thousands of qualified foreigners

Putting the economics aside, even if such an increase were statistically plausible, such a surge in net migration would be contentious both politically and socially. And it’s not even certain that increased migrant flows would be able to fill the gap in working age people and bolster public pensions: “The capacity of migratory flows to significantly mitigate the process of population ageing is limited,” the Bank of Spain warned in its report. 

What these projections suggest is that Spain’s public pension system will, in coming decades, likely have to be sustained by the contribution of fewer workers overall. This likely means higher social security payments. “Migratory flows have been very dynamic in recent years, but it does not seem likely that they can avoid the process of population ageing… nor completely resolve the imbalances that could arise in the Spanish labour market in the future,” the report stated.

The problem of ageing will also be transferred to the labour market and the types of jobs filled in the future. Increased migratory flows will soften the effect, but the labour characteristics of migrants coming to Spain may not match the job market in the coming decades. The jobs of the future, increasingly digital, will likely require qualifications that many of the migrants expected to arrive in the coming years do not have.

Consequently, the Bank of Spain suggests that “without significant changes in the nature of migratory flows, it does not seem likely that… [they] can completely resolve the mismatches between labour supply and demand that could occur in the coming years in the Spanish labour market.”

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