The arrival of migration has boosted the labor market in Catalonia, where nearly half a million jobs have been created since 2019, before the outbreak of Covid, with 59% of them being filled by foreign nationals, according to data from the Active Population Survey (EPA).
The numbers published by the National Institute of Statistics indicate that from the fourth quarter of 2019, just before the start of the health crisis, to the third quarter of 2025 – the latest available data – 265,000 foreign nationals have joined the labor market in Catalonia, accounting for 56% of the total of 472,000 jobs that Catalonia has added during this period.
The model of the Catalan productive system, like the rest of Spain, is characterized by the intensity of the workforce – as opposed to productivity – which means that economic growth is closely linked to the increase in employment, explains Josep Lladós, an Economics professor at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC).
With the significant contribution of migration to this rise in employment, "up to 50% of Catalonia’s GDP growth could be linked to the arrival of foreign nationals," illustrates Lladós.
According to Andreu Domingo, the deputy director of the Center for Demographic Studies (CED), this integration has occurred mainly in less qualified sectors, leading to an increasingly segmented labor market, although this does not diminish its importance.
In Catalonia, as Domingo recounts, the employment of foreign nationals has been mainly in key sectors for its economy such as tourism, agriculture, and the meat industry.
"The economic growth model is based on the continuous contribution of migrants," defends Domingo, a dependence not exclusive to Catalonia, but one that has shaped the evolution of most European economies.
CASE OF CATALONIA
Lladós also speaks of two opposing forces, as although the bulk of employment in Catalonia continues to be in intensive jobs, such as industry or agriculture, there is also a significant presence of sectors with a higher weight of productive employment, such as tourism.
"In Catalonia, there is a significant presence of industry, especially in the food and automotive sectors, alongside the services sector and high value-added companies," explains the economics professor, which explains the four-point higher employment rate compared to the national level.
According to INE data, at the end of the third quarter of 2025, out of the nearly four million people employed in Catalonia, 20.3% – 803,600 people – were foreign nationals, meaning one in five workers.
This group has seen the fastest growth, with a 4.69% increase in the third quarter of last year, while those employed with Spanish nationality totaled 3.1 million people at the end of the quarter, a 1.73% increase from the previous year.
The proportion of foreign nationals in Catalan employment has been progressively increasing in recent years, from 12% in the third quarter of 2015, a decade ago.
In the third quarter of 2022, the first year counted by the INE in the historical series, foreigners accounted for 6.05%.
SURGE IN PRODUCTIVITY
Alongside job creation, productivity is another major factor driving Catalonia’s productive model, an indicator that had seen a slowdown in its growth rate in recent years but has now regained momentum.
According to Lladós, this increased progress is due to two main reasons: digitization and the transformation of jobs in sectors such as telecommunications or energy, which have boosted business investment and led to a demand for more qualified and productivity-intensive jobs.
The progressive aging of the population in much of the European Union will require a significant replacement of current active workers in the future, coupled with a decline in birth rates in the region, making it difficult to meet without the arrival of migrants, analyzes the professor.
OUTSIDE THE COMMON MARKET
Within the group of foreign nationals employed in Catalonia, the majority – 619,000 people – have a nationality from a non-EU country, compared to 184,600 people from the Twenty-Seven.
A decade ago, the difference between the two groups was much smaller, with 101,200 employees of EU nationality and 274,900 employees from countries outside the European Union.
This emphasis on non-EU migration contradicts the initial plans of the European Union, as explained by Andreu Domingo from the CED, who points out that internal mobility was intended to meet the demand for low-skilled labor but has ended up hindering the entry of non-EU nationalities, which are in demand by the market.