Migratory trajectories and social networks of the foreign population in Spain

Verónica De Miguel, Universidad de Málaga
Miguel Solana, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Àngels Pascual-de-Sans, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Carmen Carvajal, Universidad de Málaga

Foreign population residing in Spain presents a high level of mobility. Our proposal sets out to explore which are the migratory trajectories of the foreign population, in the interest of knowing the migration routes inside and outside Spain and which are the factors behind this high mobility of foreign immigrants. We want to focus on the impact of social networks in defining the migratory trajectories. This is a fairly unexplored topic, since the study of migratory networks often devotes their attention both to their composition and to the role they play in the integration/no-integration process. The source of information is the National Survey of Immigrants (ENI), the first survey on migration made by the Spanish Statistics Institute in 2007. We are part of the team who has worked in the preparation of this survey, which is based on a very extensive sample(15.465 interviews to people born in another country).