Latin American's concentration and dispersion residential strategies in Madrid and Barcelona metropolitan areas. A demographic analysis through residential mobility

Jenniffer Thiers, Universitat de Barcelona
Jordi Bayona-i-Carrasco, Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics (CED), UAB
Isabel Pujadas, Universitat de Barcelona

Literature on Spanish large city foreigners’ residential segregation and concentration trends has recently highly grown. During the immigration boom years, the arrival of immigrants from abroad was the main cause of segregation and concentration patterns, even though the role of their internal migration within the country and their demographic dynamics had to a certain extent also to be taken into account. However, now that foreign immigration flows are much smaller due to the economic crisis, the role of internal movements in foreign population redistribution is much more relevant. Nevertheless, despite its importance, little is still known about the territorial distribution of return migration. Here we focus on one of these aspects, foreigner, and particularly Latin American, residential concentration patterns. In this case, this community would be particularly relevant as according to the January the 1st 2014 Padrón or local registry, 46.9% of the foreigners living in Spain on that date were Latin Americans. In fact, we especially centre our attention on Spain’s two major metropolitan areas, Madrid and Barcelona, where a large part of Latin Americans residing in Spain live. The analysis both aims to study immigrant mobility and Latin Americans’ residential patterns. On the one hand, it focuses on foreigners’ movements within metropolitan areas and their main city, differentiating their characteristics depending on whether they settle in areas where they tend to concentrate or not. On the other hand, the analysis underlines the specific sociodemographic characteristics of Latin Americans living in areas where they tend to concentrate.