958,266 arrivals in 2007: more than the ancient invasions

The 958,266 arrivals of 2007 outstrip centuries of invasions in Hispania

Rome took centuries to settle an estimated contingent of between 100,000 and 300,000 Italians on the peninsula. The Visigoths, something similar, spread out over generations. In 2007, in a single year, Spain recorded 958,266 arrivals of people from abroad. Placed side by side, the numbers need no adjectives.

The parallel between the current arrival of foreign population and the historical invasions of the peninsula has taken hold in the public debate. It is worth saying early on that the comparison is misleading: we are talking about recorded entries, not definitive settlements, and the estimates for Antiquity are anything but reliable. Even so, the jump in magnitude is large enough to frame the economic discussion of recent years.

How many immigrant arrivals were recorded each year since 1995

The administrative series of annual arrivals from abroad begins in 1995 with 36,092 people. Five years later, the figure had multiplied tenfold: 362,468 entries in 2000, growth of 184.6% in a single year. The pace did not stop: 684,561 in 2004, 840,844 in 2006 and a peak of 958,266 in 2007.

Then came the correction. The series falls to 599,074 in 2008, 392,963 in 2009 and 304,054 in 2012. That collapse coincides, of course, with the bursting of the property bubble and unemployment jumping to levels no European comparison can bear. The relationship between construction, jobs and the arrival of foreign population is no statistical accident: it is the same film told in three frames.

Some place the real change in the migration regime much later, in 2016, when the visa requirement was removed for part of the Latin American flows. Others point to 2019 — with some 700,000 people — as the point at which the matter stopped being debatable. Each cut-off in the series has its own version of when something broke.

Suebi, Visigoths and Almohads: how many people invaded Hispania

The entry of the Suebi, Vandals and Alans in 409 is estimated at 100,000 to 200,000 people, with calculations reaching 25,000-30,000 Suebi and 30,000-40,000 Alans. They were not armies: men, women and children travelled together. In 429, when a large part of the Vandals and Alans crossed to Africa, an ancient source speaks of 80,000 people, a figure modern historians consider probably inflated.

The Visigoths, in the 5th and 6th centuries, contributed a similar contingent — between 100,000 and 200,000 people — but spread over a long process and ruling over a far larger Hispano-Roman population. The Muslim conquest of 711 was, in initial demographic terms, far more modest: some 7,000 men with Tariq ibn Ziyad, reinforced up to 12,000, and the arrival of Musa ibn Nusayr in 712. In total, 20,000 to 30,000 people in the first expeditions.

The detail that breaks the easy narrative is this: twelve thousand men were enough to start a political transformation that lasted eight centuries. There was no need to replace the population. The local majority stayed, and over the generations a considerable part became Sarracinised and culturally Arabised. The conquest was not demographic. It was one of elites.

The highest unemployment in the EU with one of Europe's largest waves

Here is the paradox no textbook resolves. Spain shows the highest unemployment rate in the European Union and, at the same time, experienced one of the most intense waves of mass immigration on the continent. One of the views voiced in the debate holds that much of that workforce is low-skilled and adds extra pressure on housing and public services.

The objection is just as familiar. If labour were scarce, the market would have raised wages, and it has not. If there were a surplus, it would not explain the persistence of entire sectors — hospitality, construction, agriculture, care work — that keep demanding workers. Both versions are supported by their own data and dismissed with the other's.

On so-called remigration, scepticism is the dominant note: some argue that removing millions of settled people has no logistics or precedent and describe it as a fantasy, while another participant defends that it would indeed be possible through methods of coercion.

Who are the advertised homes being built for?

The 14 million people who have arrived since the late 1990s, according to the calculation used in the debate, explain, for part of the analysis, why mass housing construction is being discussed while the native population ages. The estimate circulating points to a 30% to 40% reduction in the population of Spanish origin in the coming decades. With those numbers, there would be surplus housing for those who remain.

Data from May 2023 put 17.3 million immigrants and naturalised citizens, one third of the total population, with a net increase of 150,000 foreigners per quarter — the equivalent of a city like Salamanca. One third of those born in Spain have a father, mother or both of foreign origin.

The other reading, the one arguing that the problem is not how much housing is missing but how much land depends on the politician of the day, also has its own series of commissions. The mass construction plan looks too much like the previous bubble's not to raise eyebrows.

Twelve thousand men in 711 were enough to change the country for eight centuries. In a single year of the bubble, almost a million people arrived. The unsettling figure is not how many come each year: it is that no one has yet defined what the number should be.