Spain reaches the record of 3.3 million foreign workers in summer

The role of immigration has come to focus the economic analyzes of the different actors that try to explain the evolution of the labor market. The Bank of Spain, the International Monetary Fund, Fedea or BBVA Research, as well as the ministries of Economy and Social Security, have placed emphasis on the transformation that Spain has experienced in the workplace after the pandemic due to a much greater arrival of migrants to that of other countries in the European environment, which has taken the numbers of employed people and people of working age to historic highs.

And this momentum was consolidated in the third quarter of the year, as reflected by the data from the Active Population Survey published this Friday by the INE. The country has set a new record for foreign workers, which now number around 3.3 million after adding more than 180,000 employees with nationality other than Spanish in the last year, which already exceeds the total number of self-employed workers that is 3.1 million. Professionals who have dual nationality are excluded from this data, although in some of the analyzes cited above they are valued as a whole. However, this group also registers an increase since the first quarter, when it exceeded the threshold of one million workers.

Of the 3,298,000 foreigners who had worked in Spain between the month of July and September, almost two million had been residing in the country for more than seven years, while another 594,000 had already arrived between four and six years ago. Just over 310,000 of these workers had moved their residence in the last year, which reflects the intense migratory flow referred to by the organization chaired by José Luis Escrivá in its latest quarterly report on the Spanish economy.

This element has contributed to explaining in the last two years why the net creation of jobs that has occurred after the pandemic and that has coincided with the introduction of the labor reform had not translated into a significant reduction in the unemployment rate. arrest. The active population is the key, as it is the denominator used to calculate this reference, so its record levels have led Spain to continue leading the European unemployment ranking, despite having more workers than ever in the historical series. In the last quarter, unemployment reached 11.2% and the level prior to the 2008 crisis that led to intense job destruction has been recovered.