It was barely a minute past midnight on the 1st when Jacob, son of Liseth Manuela and Wilson David, was born in La Seu d’Urgell. And an hour and a half later, in Manresa, Inass, daughter of Rachah and Abderahim, became the first girl to be born in Catalonia in 2024. When her name and the origin of her parents were known, the networks were filled with xenophobic and racist arguments about whether or not they should be considered “the first Catalans of the year.”
The reality is that Jacob and Inass are the confirmation of the new demographic profile of Catalonia, where due to aging and the drop in the birth rate, the population has only grown for some time due to the arrival of foreigners (16% of the inhabitants already are), three out of every ten women of childbearing age come from other countries, and their birth rate (measured in number of births per thousand inhabitants) is two and a half times higher than that of women born in Spain. The consequence is that the relative weight of births to foreign mothers continues to grow and now represents a third of the total.
“It is not that more children are being born to foreigners than 10 or 15 years ago, what is happening is that births to native mothers have plummeted, so that the proportion of babies born to foreign mothers is growing and that feeds the idea that “Only children of immigrants are born,” explains the director of the Center d’Estudis Demogràfics (CED), Albert Esteve.
He assures that immigrants residing in Catalonia do not have many more children than natives. Their fertility rate measured in children per woman is not very far off: 1.39 among foreign women and 1.12 among those of Spanish nationality.
“The fertility of foreign women is nothing to write home about, they do not even reach the level of generational replacement (2.1 children per woman), what happens is that the generation of Spanish women in their thirties, who would have to have children, It is a very empty generation: there are few of them and their fertility is at a minimum,” comments Esteve.
According to birth data from the INE corresponding to Catalonia, in 2022 5.8 babies were born per thousand inhabitants of Spanish nationality, compared to 14.15 per thousand foreigners. Ten years earlier, in 2012, these rates were 8.75 and 19.6 respectively, which confirms Esteve’s argument: the drop in birth rates also affects immigrants, who have fewer and fewer children, but their weight on the total of births because the birth rate of the natives is at a minimum.
The global fertility rate, which measures births per thousand women, shows the same evolution: in the last decade it has fallen from 58.23 to 44.18 among foreign women and from 39.24 to 28.37 among Spanish women. Furthermore, Catalonia now has lower fertility rates than the Spanish average among both the native population and the foreign population, something that did not happen in 2012.
Statistics also indicate that foreign women are encouraged to have children at younger ages than Spanish women, which increases the chances of having them or becoming mothers more than once. In Catalonia, foreign women who had children in 2022 were on average 2.4 years younger than Spanish women.
“For many years we have been in a demographic situation that leads us to population decline due to natural dynamics; What happens is that the situation was masked because when the baby boom generation reached the age of becoming parents, as there were many of them, even though they had few children, we saw the number of births increase; It did so until 2008, but now the opposite is happening and two trends are adding up in favor of the decrease in the native population: few children continue to be had and there are few candidates to be fathers or mothers because generations of few people are of fertile age,” he emphasizes. the director of the Center d’Estudis Demogràfics.
And he points out that we will have to wait ten or fifteen years for those who were born between 2000 and 2008 to reach their thirties, “when there was a mini baby-boom,” to see if the trend is broken and the birth rate in Catalonia slightly increases. and in Spain.
The number of births in Catalonia in 2022 – the last year for which there is definitive data – was the lowest since 1996. 56,344 were registered, 2.2% less than in 2021, and the number of newborns decreased in 27 of the 42 regions existing on that date. The largest decreases were recorded in La Conca de Barberà (-16.7%), L’Alta Ribargorça (-15%) and Berguedà (12.1%), according to Idescat data.
