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UNDERSTANDING SPANIARDS

Record numbers of Spaniards living outside of Spain’s borders

Spain has long been a dream destination for foreigners looking to start a new life, but Spaniards are themselves living abroad in record numbers and the vast majority are of working age.

Published: 25 March 2024 12:42 CET
Record numbers of Spaniards living outside of Spain’s borders
Photo: Gregory/Pexels.

The number of Spaniards living abroad continues to rise, reaching a record level of almost three million people in 2023. In total there are 2,908,649 Spaniards living outside Spain, the highest figure since records began. This is according to data collected for the Padrón de Españoles Residentes en el Extranjero (PERE) by Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE).

Since the database was started in 2009, the number of Spaniards living abroad has increased by a staggering 97 percent, meaning that around 1.5 million Spaniards have left the country in that time.

However, less than a third of Spanish nationals living abroad were actually born in Spain (855,303 people) whereas well over half (1,706,529 people) were born in their current country of residence, the majority of them in Latin America.

READ ALSO: Foreigners account for almost 100% of Spain’s population increase

By continent, 58.7 percent are resident in the Americas, 37.7 percent in Europe, and just 3.6 percent around the rest of the world, although the largest increases in 2023 in relative terms were in Asia (7.9 percent) and Africa (4.8 percent).

In terms of age breakdown, the results are unsurprising. Just 15 percent of Spaniards living abroad are under 16.

62 percent are of working age, that is to say, between the ages of 16-64, and 22 percent are over 65.

By continent, 58.7 percent of those registered were resident in the Americas, 37.7 percent in Europe and 3.6 percent around the rest of the world.

By country, the highest number of Spanish nationals live in Argentina (482,176), France (310,072) and the United States (206,278). However, Mexico is the country that has experienced the greatest increase, with a total of 15,918 Spaniards registered in the last year alone.

This is no coincidence, as Spain’s Democratic Memory Law established the Grandchildren’s Law (Ley de Nietos), which opened up citizenship routes to descendants of victims of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship and potentially grants citizenship hundreds of thousands of people around Latin America.

READ ALSO: Spain’s new ‘grandchildren’ citizenship law: What you need to know

The ‘brain drain’

With rising housing costs and consistently poor job prospects for younger, educated Spaniards, the INE data confirms the long-established ‘brain drain’ affecting the Spanish labour market and economy more broadly. The issue has become significant enough that the Ministry of Social Security recently outlined plans for a strategic plan to try and entice Spaniards living abroad back to the country.

With almost 1.7 million Spaniards of working age abroad, the Ministry plans to try and tempt them back by increasing the budgets for aid given to returnees, and will place a special emphasis on health and educational professionals, as well those working in the social and cultural sectors.

On a regional basis, the parts of Spain where the most people are leaving are Galicia, Madrid, Catalonia, Andalusia and the Canary Islands.

A recent study by BBVA and the Valencian Institute of Economic Research (IVIE) estimated the impact of the loss of Spain’s educated workforce, concluding that the roughly 400,000 Spaniards with higher education qualifications who left the country in 2022 represented a loss of wealth equivalent to 1 percent of the total value of the labour force available to the Spanish economy.

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SPAIN EXPLAINED

Why the Basque Country is the strike capital of Spain

Around half of all strikes in Spain take place in the Basque Country, but it wasn't always that way.

Published: 28 March 2024 14:48 CET
Why the Basque Country is the strike capital of Spain

Though airport workers are currently striking in Valencia and Madrid, and trade unions have played a leading role in the farmers’ protests across the country in recent weeks, there’s a specific part of Spain that stands head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to industrial action — the Basque Country.

According to figures from the Basque government’s Labour Relations Council (CRL), in 2023 almost half (46 percent) of the total strikes called in Spain took place in the Basque Country.

In 2022, that figure was 50.36 percent. That is to say, a region with less than 5 percent of the country’s total population had half of its strikes. More specifically, 342 of the 679 strikes that took place in Spain in 2022 were in the Basque Country alone, according to data from the Ministry of Labour.

READ ALSO: What are the pros and cons of life in Spain’s Basque Country?

What explains this phenomenon? Is there an underlying explanation? Are the Basque people particularly organised or more radical than other Spaniards?

Part of the explanation for this trend comes from the fact that Basque trade unions have grown, or maintained, at least, as union activity has declined in the rest of the country.

As Spanish trade unions slowly began waning in power and membership over the years (like in many countries around the world) the Basque Country became a hotbed of trade unionism activity and industrial action in Spain from the early-2000s. In more recent years, the 2020s in particular, the proportion of strikes in the Basque Country versus the rest of Spain has grown ever higher due to an overall decrease in the number of strikes around the rest of the country.

Jon Las Heras, Professor of Political Economy at the University of the Basque Country and expert on Basque unions, says that this high rate of strikes compared to the rest of Spain is due, above all, to the trade union model and strategy adopted by the region’s two major unions, Eusko Langileen Alkartasuna (ELA) and Langile Abertzaleen Batzordeak (LAB).

“ELA and LAB have formed a ‘counter-power’ bloc in opposition to CCOO and UGT [the traditional, major unions in Spain] that are more prone to engage into social dialogue,” Las Heras argues in his paper Striking to Renew: Basque Unions’ Organising Strategies and the Use of the Strike-Fund.

This strategy, he argues, is “based on organising workers ‘deeply’ – especially with ELA’s recurrent use of a strike-fund that fosters membership participation and affiliation through confederal solidarity.”

In short, whereas Spain’s larger national unions are, Las Heras suggests, more inclined to dialogue to resolve industrial disputes, Basque unions prefer more direct action. “This has produced very high strike rates since the 2000s, perhaps the highest in Europe,” he adds.

It is worth considering that the Basque Country, in addition to effectively using strike funds, is also one of the wealthiest parts of Spain. In other words, that workers in the Basque Country take home the second highest salaries in Spain on average, behind only Madrid, could mean that union members are more inclined (or have the financial flexibility) to take strike action than if they were from poorer regions such as Murcia, Extremadura and Andalusia.

READ ALSO: Why are the Basque Country and Catalonia so rich compared to the rest of Spain?

At the very least, being wealthier on average means that Basque workers can afford to stay on strike longer than workers in other parts of the country, something essential when settling disputes through industrial action.

However, trade unionists would no doubt point to their strong trade unionism as one of the reasons they are comparatively well paid, rather than the other way around.

But it wasn’t always like this. According to Las Heras, ELA, LAB and other Basque unions formerly relied on dialogue and sector-wide collective bargaining agreements, as many unions still do, but began to develop “a strategy of political autonomy and trade union action at a level closer to the grassroots” between the 1990s and the 2000s.

This came about partly as a result of changes to the labour market and industrial changes in the Basque Country (which began from the 1980s onwards, notably the types of industry and engineering in the region) as well Basque unions distancing themselves from national unions

“The rise of the second Basque union (LAB) allowed for the two Basque sovereigntist unions to form a new alliance that stood in opposition to the two main Spanish unions,” Las Herras argues.

But it’s also about strategy. Elena Pérez Barredo, Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Security in the Basque government, told La Vanguardia that the fundamental reason strikes are so common “lies in the trade union difference that exists in the Basque Country.”

“The ELA has a union strategy and culture that encourages confrontation… a very marked strategy in favour of the strike as an instrument of confrontation,” she adds.

There seem to be several plausible, inter-connected reasons that the Basque Country became Spain’s (and possibly Europe’s) strike capital.

It has strong regional trade unions that exist separately from the larger confederate national unions; these unions have effective strike funds, meaning they can strike for longer; their employees are, on average, likely to be better paid than elsewhere in Spain, meaning they could be more inclined and financially able to take strike action; and finally, Basque unions take a more direct, confrontational approach to industrial disputes, whereas other unions rely more on dialogue and border collective bargaining agreements.

Perhaps Unai Rementeria, a local Basque politician, summed it up best after widespread strike action in the region in 2019. Basque unions, he said simply, “seek permanent confrontation.”

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