Late last month the tiny Spanish territory of Ceuta, an enclave on the North African side of the Strait of Gibraltar, was suddenly overrun by an influx of tens of thousands of migrants—overwhelmingly, young Moroccan men. (Spain’s Interior Minister put the count at 72,000—over 75 of whom died in the chaos.)
The bizarre episode electrified the European public and alarmed EU governments. Spain’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, labeled it “an attack” and “a violation of territorial integrity of Spain.” A week later, almost all had been forced back into Morocco.
Many troubling questions about the Ceuta affair remain unanswered—including just how a surprise operation of this scale could have taken place in the first place. But this surge of unwelcome illegal immigration also shines a spotlight on Spain’s established official policies for welcoming the legal mass influx of immigrants: including very large numbers of Moroccans.
More than perhaps any other European country, Spain is committed to countering depopulation through bringing newcomers in from abroad: and specifically, from outside Europe. By its own lights, the policy has clearly been a success in some important respects. It also appears to have unintended consequences that are only now coming into focus.
For most of its modern history, Spain was a nation of emigrants. That changed after Franco’s death in 1975. Economic and political factors played a role, of course: the transition to democracy and EU accession made for greater labor demand. But demography also played its part.
Upon Franco’s death, for whatever reason, birth totals in Spain plunged precipitously, never to recover. By the mid-1990s—when the 1970s birth drop began to pinch the flow of new entrants into the labor force—Spain commenced a liberalization of immigration laws that has extended and expanded over time, including generous provisions for naturalization.
By the first decade of the 21st century, when Spain registered a baby boomlet, almost all of the blip was due to the progeny of the country’s new immigrants. Indeed, by 2024 births to native-born Spaniards were barely a third of their level 100 years earlier.
Without immigration, Spain’s population would have stagnated in the first quarter of the 21st century. According to official Spanish data, births exceeded deaths by barely 200,000 for the 2000-2025 period (2025 numbers still provisional)—or less than one half of 1 percent of Spain’s 2000 population. Thanks to its robust immigration inflows, however, Spain registered more population growth than any other EU country between 2000 and 2025. Virtually all (98 percent) of Spain’s population growth was due to immigration during those years. And since deaths have exceeded births in Spain since 2015, any future growth would have to come entirely from additional immigration.
Mass immigration has rapidly transformed the composition of the Spanish population. By 2025, roughly one in five people in Spain was foreign-born: a markedly higher fraction than in America that same year (or than the US in the 1890s, during our first great immigration surge, for that matter).
Yet Spain is by no means the only European country today with a higher foreign-born fraction of national population than the USA—and there are EU countries where immigrants make up an even higher share of total population. But such places (think Germany, Sweden, Austria, Ireland) have much more intra-EU migration than Spain. Almost one in six in Spain today comes from non-EU countries. That is the highest proportion ever recorded for any large European country.
As might be expected, Spain’s foreign-born population is disproportionately composed of men and women of conventionally defined working ages (15-64). As of 2025, according to Eurostat, nearly one in four (24 percent) people of working age in Spain was an immigrant. This, too, is taken as a policy success in some political circles in Spain—most especially the ruling Sanchez government.
As for childbearing: the newcomers to Spain are doing more than their share—hardly a surprise, given today’s anemic birth levels in Spain. (The current fertility rate for Spanish natives is scarcely half the replacement level, but more on this later.)
As of 2024, one in three newborns in Spain had a foreign-born mother. This is not the highest ratio for an OECD country of any appreciable size nowadays—in both Canada and Switzerland, for example, over two out of five new mothers are currently foreign-born. But it is among the highest in the EU today (excepting only tiny anomalies like Luxembourg and Malta)—far higher than in the US—and may still be rising.
Spain’s experiment in mass immigration begs the question of how its enormous new wave of newcomers is assimilating into the life of the country. And what about their children, who constitute a very large fraction of Spain’s rising generation? We will examine these issues next.
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