Spain’s migration system and regional patterns in the management of foreign population

Belén Fernández Suárez, Universidade da Coruña

This paper analyzes the relation between Spain’s immigrants’ integration politics at a regional scale and its national management of migration flows as a whole. The main hypothesis is that those regional politics, which can only refer to integration matters, do have consequences on regional migration flows, arriving directly from other countries as well as from other regions of Spain. First, a sociodemographic analysis of each region’s migrant population will be presented, in order to develope a typology of regional patterns within Spain’s migration system (with statistical data and methodology). Here, different qualitative research strategies are employed –content analysis of institutional discourse on migration, fieldwork to assess actions with relevant social agents. Finally, specific actions and conditions of the different regional integration politics are identify and associated with the different types of migration patterns -and so, with a differential impact on the national flows and composition of migrant populations in Spain.