New realities of Portuguese emigration – Portuguese immigrants in Spain

Maria João Guardado Moreira, ESE - IPCB

The growth dynamics of the Portuguese population during centuries has been one of emigration, despite variation in intensity, destination and regional impact of leaving. In the last decades of the 20th century a new reality came into being: that of an influx of foreign migration into Portuguese territory. However, the emigration fluxes to other countries did not disappear. After the mid-nineteen-eighties there was a kind of renovation of this tendency with new forms of mobility and new destinations. Destinations such as Spain witnessed a growth in the number of Portuguese temporary and permanent workers. The main aim is to portray the socio-demographics of the Portuguese community in Spain through interviews to over 500 individuals, within the scope of the Encuesta Nacional de Inmigrantes [ENI, 2007]. This survey includes a sample of over 15 thousand people among the population born outside Spain, over 16 years of age, who has been living for at least one year in the country or, if not there for a year yet, intends to live habitually there. This group of Portuguese immigrants has not been the object of many surveys. It is therefore important to engage in deeper studies of these communities in order to understand both their social and economical situation when they depart and their migratory strategies. The importance of the study also resides in the fact that these strategies usually cover both the origin and the destination, and the use of familiar, friendship or neighborhood networks. It is our intent to cover mainly those aspects that relate to departure and arrival situations, such as the role of migratory networks in the decision to immigrate, as well as previous migratory experience, in order to clarify the specificities of Portuguese immigrants in Spain in the context of contemporary Portuguese migratory dynamics.