ABSTRACT
As an old harbour city, Barcelona shares with Rotterdam a past linked to the industrial revolution and a long tradition of labour migration. Together with the Basque Country, Catalonia was one of the main industrial areas that led the economic development of Spain from the nineteenth century onwards. During the 1960s the growth of the industrial sector drew many unskilled workers to Barcelona from other regions of the country, particularly Andalusia and Extremadura. Nowadays the region of Catalonia has the highest percentage of foreigners in the whole country: 21.3% of the total population. Most of them live in the city of Barcelona (Secretaría de Migraciones 2006). According to data from the 2006 municipal register, 16.5% of the 1.6 million inhabitants of Barcelona were foreign‐born, notably above the national average of 9.3% (INE 2006, INE 2007). The major immigrant groups in the city come from Asia (mostly from the Philippines, China and Pakistan), North Africa (especially Morocco) and Latin America (Ecuador, Colombia and the Dominican Republic).
