Quo Vadis Hispania? Part Two | American Enterprise Institute
Mass immigration is arguably the most important demographic force at play in Europe today. It is also one of the most salient—and polarizing—issues in contemporary European politics.
In our previous post we examined the case of Spain—a country with nearly 50 million inhabitants that has in effect embraced mass immigration to forestall the prospect of depopulation due to extreme and prolonged sub-replacement fertility by native Spaniards.
By its own lights, that population policy has been successful in important respects. Thanks to immigration, rather than declining over the past generation, Spain’s total population and working-age manpower are now higher than ever before. In absolute terms, in fact, both of these rose more between 2000 and 2025 than in any other EU state.
But the steady inflow of immigrants over the past generation has also necessarily transformed Spain’s demography. Immigrants and their descendants now account for a very substantial share of Spain’s under-40 population. And not all newcomers (and their descendants) seem to be assimilating well.
Just how much has immigration transformed Spain’s population already? For an overview, we constructed a special “population pyramid” to display Spain’s national population not only by age and sex, but also by “migration background”. We based it on official data from the INE, the Spanish Statistical Office.[1]
In this population pyramid we distinguish the native-born Spanish population from the foreign-born—and further distinguish “second-generation” Spaniards (those with at least one foreign-born parent) from the rest of the native-born population. We also disaggregate Spain’s first- and second-generation immigrant population by four main places of origin: 1) Morocco/other Africa; 2) Latin America; 3) other non-EU countries; and 4) EU countries.
Our estimate below captures all enumerated immigrants, but undercounts second-generation immigrants somewhat since it misses those not living in the homes of their foreign-born parents. So Spain’s true migration-related population is probably somewhat larger than depicted here.
This migration-oriented population pyramid details a number of interesting stories. Let’s begin with what it reveals about what we might call Spain’s “legacy” population—Spaniards who are not part of the influx of mass migration.
Of Spain’s roughly 49 million people at the start of 2025, our estimates suggest that about 37 million were neither first- nor second-generation immigrants. It has been a very long time since Spain’s “legacy” population was that small.
The non-migrant Spanish population has been shrinking for roughly a decade and a half. We’d have to go back almost half a century—to the late 1970s—for a Spain with as few people of pre-influx roots as today. And while working-age manpower in Spain is now at all-time highs, “legacy” Spain’s manpower totals today are no higher than in the early 1980s.
Currently legacy Spain is declining by about 200,000 per year, with roughly two deaths for every birth. And the tempo is accelerating, since legacy Spain has two-and-a-half times as many fifty-somethings as children under 10.
Absent mass immigration, Spain today would look like Japan. The striking demographic similarities can be seen below. Were it a country, non-migrant Spain would vie with Japan as the world’s most aged nation. Its percentage of children is even lower than Japan’s, since fertility levels have been lower in the former for most of the past forty years. At 1.07 births per woman last year, non-migrant Spain is at barely half the replacement level.
For its part, Spain’s first- and second-generation immigrant population comprises at least 12 million—almost 9.5 million immigrants and over 2.5 million of their descendants. The population from the mass influx since the 1990s is much more youthful than legacy Spain (median age 35 vs. nearly 50). They are disproportionately part of the Spanish future.
By our estimates, over a third of Spain’s under-40 population are now first- or second-generation immigrants. And our numbers suggest that nearly two-fifths of Spain’s children under 5 are the children of immigrants, or immigrants themselves. Since our method misses second-generation immigrants not living with their parents, the absolute and relative size of Spain’s mass migration population is likely somewhat greater than we estimate.
Spain’s two most significant immigrant populations originate from Latin America and Morocco/Africa, respectively. Latin Americans and their descendants account for nearly half of Spain’s mass migration population. But more first- and second-generation immigrants come from Morocco than any other country. Together, Spain’s populations of Latin American and Moroccan/other African heritage account for over 8 million people—nearly one in six in Spain today.
How well are these groups assimilating? We’ll take a look in our next post.
[1] Our construct mates the 2025 census’ overall age-sex totals with 2024 microdata on both country of birth for immigrants and country of origin for the parents of children born in Spain from INE’s EPA survey on household economic activity.
