He boom employment after the pandemic has a clear cause: immigration. Since 2021, nine out of ten People who have entered the labor market, whether they are working or looking for work, have foreign nationality. In fact, the average annual growth in foreign employment currently exceeds that recorded between 2000 and 2008, during the housing bubble.
If employment is one of the main drivers of the economy, as the government claims, Immigration is their fuel. Between the second quarter of 2021 and this year, Spain added 1,137,498 assets; of them, 90.5% are from third countriesThis means that more than a million people who entered the labour market are foreigners.
According to the analysis of Fedea and BBVA Research in your Quarterly Labour Market Observatory Compared to the second quarter of this year, only between 2014 and 2019 did immigrants have a greater impact on the growth of the labour force. However, this is a period when the labour market is not very dynamic.
Europe Press
During these five years, almost 275,000 people joined the workforce, but more than 300,000 Spaniards left this account. In other words, growth was only maintained by incorporation of more than half a million immigrants to the labor market.
However, when compared to the last period of economic expansion preceding the current one, the boom real estate, when many immigrants came to Spain to work in construction, three-year period 2021-2024 presents a greater dynamism in the incorporation of the foreign population.
Between 2000 and 2008, 60.7% of people entering the labour market were foreigners.. In total, three of the five million workers who entered the labour market during these years of economic prosperity. In any case, this is far from the 90.5% recorded in recent years.
In the case of the occupied population —people who work—, the weight of immigrants in the growth of recent years is not so high, even if they remain in the majority. Between 2021 and 2024, 58.9% of new workers came from third countries. In this case, it is the maximum of the historical series.
Of the nearly 2 million new workers, 1,158,782 are foreigners. To find a similar proportion, we must go back, once again, to the time of the boom real estate. Between 2000 and 2008, Spain added 5.5 million active people, including 2.6 million came from third countries.
Beyond the strong presence of immigrants in the Spanish labor market, Florentino Felgueroso, researcher at Fedea, highlighted during the presentation of the Quarterly Observatory that Occupational segregation among foreign workers has decreased regarding the migratory wave of the year 2000. According to Felgueroso, foreigners occupy jobs “across the entire professional spectrum.”
“Immigration in this second phase no longer comes to do what we do not want, but also to relieve jobs for which we have no population“, stressed the Fedea researcher.
However, the majority of foreign workers are concentrated in three professions: domestic work, salaried servers and cleaning staffwho represent 30% of employees of foreign nationality.
For her part, Raquel Carrasco, professor at UC3M and researcher at Fedea, stressed that The gross salary of immigrants from outside the European Union is 30% lower than that of the local population. But this is also explained by the fact that they are generally younger, less educated and work more part-time and in less skilled jobs, such as construction.
If all these factors are taken into account, Carrasco stressed, “There is only a 6% differential left”a percentage that could be attributed to the “discrimination” that the migrant population could suffer.
