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By Jordan King
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Spain's birth rate has gone up for the first time in a decade, and it's largely thanks to immigration, several population experts have said.
Countries all over the world are facing population crises with births below figures needed to sustain current populations, leaving older people dependent on a shrinking working-age population.
But Spain's situation seems to be improving, with 1,378 more births in 2024 than in 2023, and analysts are attributing this to immigration.
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"Immigrants not only add to overall population growth but also make the population more youthful," demographer and senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, William Frey, told Newsweek. "That's because immigrants and their children, together, tend to be younger than the native population."
Spain's Birth and Fertility Rates
Spain is struggling with a fertility rate (the average number of births per woman) of 1.4, according to Macrotrends—in developed countries, an average of 2.1 live births per woman is considered the threshold needed to sustain the population.
Spain's figure has only changed slightly over the last four years—it went from 1.39 in 2022 to 1.4 in 2024—but the actual number of births has jumped from 320,656 in 2023 to 322,034 in 2024, according to Spain's National Statistics Institute.
While this is also only a modest jump (0.4 percent), it is the first time Spain's births have increased after 10 consecutive years of decline—the number of births fell by 2 percent in 2023.
Immigration Helping Spain
Spain has taken a different approach to immigration compared to many of its European counterparts, embracing it as a way to grow the economy and sustain the welfare state.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told Parliament last October: "Spain needs to choose between being an open and prosperous country or a closed-off, poor country. It's as simple as that."
The year 2022 was a record year for immigration into Spain, with 1.1 million people arriving in the country, according to the Bank of Spain, with many of these people working-age.
Spain's Ministry for Social Security and Migration said nearly 3 million foreign-born workers represent 13 percent of the country's workforce.
Some 85 percent of the 433,000 people who found a job between January and September last year were foreigners, the Bank of Spain said.
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Immigrants "add to the size of the labor force age population, which is especially important when there are growing numbers of retirees," Frey said. Spain is one of many developed countries with an aging population—caused by a combination of lower birth and fertility rates while people continue to live longer.
"This younger population also increases the proportion of women of childbearing age, therefore yielding more births," Frey said. "I think other industrialized low-growth, aging countries, including the U.S., can learn from Spain's experience."
Similarly, Dr. Theodore D. Cosco, a research fellow at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, told Newsweek: "If immigration occurs when women are of prime childbearing years, this can boost birth rates. An infusion of younger migrants can boost the total birth rate, which can, in turn, shore up the workforce, which in turn supports economic growth."
But both Frey and Cosco warned against oversimplifying Spain's circumstance. Cosco said there are a "myriad factors are at play."
What Else Is at Play
There are multiple factors influencing how immigration is affecting Spain, including the fact that the majority of Spain's immigrants come from Latin America.
Demographer Anne Goujon, who heads the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis' Population and Just Societies Program, told Newsweek: "Latin American migrants represent a significant share of the migrant population and are generally better integrated compared to other migrant groups.
"At the moment, migrants are considered more of an asset in Spain than in many other European countries, and the government is strengthening their rights and facilitating their integration."
One aspect of this is that Spain is a service-driven country that is easily open to South American migrants who speak the same language.
Warning Over 'Population Collapse' by 2100
A report published by the McKinsey Global Institute at the beginning of this year warned that major economies are heading toward a "population collapse" by 2100.
In 75 years, populations in major economies will fall by 20 to 50 percent, based on U.N. projections, the study says.
This is because two-thirds of the world's population live in countries with fertility rates below the "replacement rate."
Over the past quarter century, some 90 percent of the world's countries have seen the fertility rate decline, while life expectancy has increased in most places.
Researchers wrote: "Falling fertility rates shift the demographic balance toward youth scarcity and more older people, who are dependent on a shrinking working-age population. Longer life spans accelerate the shift."
The report essentially calls for countries to focus on increasing fertility rates. It says: "Long-standing work practices and the social contract must change. More fundamentally, countries will need to raise fertility rates to avert depopulation—a societal shift without precedent in modern history."
It also calls for higher productivity, more work per person and effective migration.
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