I. O. ABRAMOVA Candidate of Economic Sciences Migration Keywords:, Spain, A frica, labor resources, integration, illegal migration Spain became an attractive country for migrants only in the mid-1980s. The first migrants were Europeans, mostly retired people, who were attracted by the warm climate of Spain. After the fall of the "iron curtain" and the aggravation of socio-economic problems in a number of third world countries, flows of legal and illegal migrants rushed to Spain. In 1975, there were 200,000 foreigners in Spain. Over the next 25 years, the number of legal migrants alone increased to 1 million, accounting for 2.5% of the country's population of 40 million. At the beginning of 2008, the number of migrants in Spain reached 5.22 million, of whom 3.98 million had an official residence permit, while the remaining 1.24 million were illegal immigrants. In 2008, foreigners accounted for 11.3% of Spain's 46 million population1. At the same time, most of the population growth in this country in recent years has been due to the influx of migrants. IMMIGRATION TO REPLACE EMIGRATION The reasons that have turned Spain into a country of immigration are related to both the internal situation in Spain and external socio-economic and political factors. Spain's EU membership and sustained economic growth in the 2000s, right up to the onset of the financial and economic crisis, made the country very attractive for migrants. The rise in the standard of living of Spaniards was an indirect reason for the shortage of workers in a number of sectors of the economy, in particular in agriculture, where earnings no longer corresponded to the living standards of the average Spaniard. Spain's liberal migration policy in the 1980s and 1990s was also an important factor that stimulated external migration. The tightening of migration laws in traditional recipient countries such as Germany, France, and Switzerland, which began in the 1970s, as well as in the United States in the mid-198 ... Read more