Original title: The Latin American Demographic Boom in Spain. Mass Immigration and Ethnic Convergence in a New Country of Immigration
Miguel González-Leonardo, Guillaume Marois, Elena Ambrosetti · September 2026
Spain used to have more people leave than arrive, but it quickly became a major destination for immigrants. Spain took in around 510,000 immigrants each year between 2000 and 2022, with approximately half coming from Latin America. Researchers wanted to know how this influx changes population diversity over time in a newer immigration country. To study this, they tracked population records, looked back at birth records to check parents' origins, and modeled how age groups and ethnic mixing will shift future generations. They found a fast transformation. Between 2000 and 2022, the share of people under 40 with a foreign background jumped from 5% to 28%, with 13% having a Latin American background in 2022. If migration, birth, and ethnic-mixing trends stay constant, over 65% of people under 40 will have a foreign background by 2062, including 32% with a Latin American background, showing how births reshape the native population.
Imagine a small school that for decades only had students from the same neighborhood. Then suddenly, new families arrive every year, many from the same city. Within twenty years, over a quarter of students have parents who weren't born locally. Now predict the next forty years: those children grow up, have kids of their own, some marry someone from the original neighborhood, some marry another newcomer. Even if no more new families arrive, the share of students with ties to that other city keeps growing because of those births. In this paper, 'new families' are Latin American immigrants arriving in Spain, and the school's student body is Spain's young population.
In a country that barely had immigration before the 1990s, one in four young people now has a migrant parent or was born abroad. Governments need updated measures of diversity—not just current residents but their children and grandchildren—to plan schools, housing, and civic integration. The findings suggest that even if migration stopped tomorrow, the ethnic mix would keep shifting for decades through births and intermarriage.
The projections assume constant migration, fertility, and ethnic-mixing patterns—assumptions that may not hold if policy or economic conditions change. The study does not capture the diversity of origin countries beyond the Latin American category, nor does it measure integration outcomes like income, education, or language. Results are specific to Spain and may not generalize to other recent immigration countries.
Ask anything about this paper. Answers come from its abstract, and say so when the abstract doesn't cover your question.
The Latin American Demographic Boom in Spain. Mass Immigration and Ethnic Convergence in a New Country of Immigration — Miguel González-Leonardo, Guillaume Marois, Elena Ambrosetti — SocArXiv — doi:10.31235/osf.io/rqv5j_v1
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.