Walter Finch
THE idea that immigrants are taking our jobs might never have been truer than in Spain, where 40% of new jobs created in the first half of 2024 were filled by foreigners.
To put it into perspective, as of July 1, 2024, only 13.9% of the population of Spain was made up of foreigners.
The latest data from Spains’ social security agency showed that while the Spanish-born workforce increased by 1.8% in the first half of the year, it increased by 8.63% for foreigners.
And when the data is expanded to include dual-nationality citizens, it finds that together with the foreigners they account for 75% of the new jobs created between January and July.
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According to figures from June, there were 21.39 million workers in Spain, with 2.9 million being foreign.
However, the number of foreign workers has nearly doubled in the last ten years. In 2014 it was just 1.5 million.
In this period, Spain was just starting to recover from a brutal depression brought about by the double-whammy 2008 financial crisis and the 2012 euro crisis, which left 6 million people unemployed.
Unsurprisingly, most of the new job creation has come in Spain’s booming tourism and hospitality sector – the cause of numerous protests in some cities.
Here, 107,523 jobs were created in the first half of 2024, accounting for 25% of the total and far above the 18,446 created in the construction sector.
And according to data from Spain’s Tax Agency, 21% of foreigners work in the hospitality sector. This is followed by 16.4% in commerce and 11.1% in construction.
The eye-opening stats on foreign participation in the labour force should not detract from the booming Spanish economy, however, which grew at 2.6% in the last year.
In the first half of 2024 alone 556,879 jobs were created, while in the same period in 2023 it was 573,669 and for 2022 it was 523,419.
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While the foreigners may be snapping up a lot of the jobs, they are not winning when it comes to salaries.
Spanish men still earn by far the most in Spain, with an average salary of €26,448, followed by Spanish women at €21,033 (a full 20% less).
Meanwhile, foreign men earn on average €16,950, while foreign women earn €13,401 (again exactly 20% less), according to the tax agency.
The country that sent the most immigrants to Spain in the last six months is Colombia, with 37,936 – or 16.5% of the total new workers.
Italy comes second with 22,879 (9,9%), then Morocco with 21,488 (9.3%).
Also notable in the creation of jobs in the last six months are Romania (17,115), Venezuela (13,033), Peru (11,180), Argentina (8,441), Senegal (8,372) and Ukraine (5,407).
In absolute figures, the foreign country that contributed the most members to the Spanish labour market at the end of June was Romania (350,449), with a very narrow margin compared to Morocco (344,631). Colombia (213,506), Italy (198,622) and Venezuela (161,961) complete the top five.
