FOREIGN residents in Spain increased by 2% - a six-figure sum – last year, despite the pandemic and Brexit, and broke the 5.8-million barrier for the first time ever.
Non-Spaniards living in the country account for just over 12% of the total headcount, of whom about six in 10 are from EU and EEA countries.
For the purposes of the research, even though the figures were taken as at the last day of 2020 when the UK had been a third country for 11 months, its nationals were considered as being among those of the EU and EEA régime given that the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement allows for British citizens already resident in the other 27 to be treated broadly the same within their adopted countries.
This means they lose their freedom of movement throughout other EU member States, where they would be treated as third-country nationals, but retain their EU 'green certificate' of registration if they do not wish to swap it for a foreigners' photo ID card, and are not subject to non-EU immigration rules if they are already officially resident in the member country.
This definition, which puts Brits among citizens of the remaining EU-27 and also Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, may change for the purposes of statistics-gathering in future years.
As it happened, Brits were the migrant community which saw the second-largest growth in Spain, at 6%, although a long way short of the Venezuelans, a segment of the population which swelled in size by 53% in 2020.
Romanian, Moroccan, British and Italian nationals most numerous
With the Covid-19 crisis reducing movement, migration to Spain has seen considerably less growth in the past calendar year, according to the Permanent Immigration Observatory, part of the department run by the Secretary-General for Inclusion Policy and Objectives and Social Prevision, which falls within the remit of the ministry for inclusion.
Whilst growth in migration into Spain has been rising consistently since 2014, the pandemic broke the trend, but even then, 137,120 non-Spaniards made the country their home in 2020, even though this was the smallest increase seen since 2016.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com