Spain gains 900,000 new residents in 2005
The study presented Friday did not provide a breakdown between native-born Spaniards and immigrants, but the same statistics institute said in April that Spain's population included 3.7 million foreigners, or 8.4 percent of the total.
Spain posted its biggest-ever population increase last year, gaining more than 900,000 residents in a surge due almost exclusively to immigration, the government says. The 2.1 percent rate of growth in the population is included in a report presented Friday to the government by the National Statistics Institute. It said Spain's population as of January stood at 44.1 million. The rate of increase was well above the 0.5 percent for the 25-nation European Union as a whole and 0.63 percent for the 11 EU countries that use the Euro as their currency.
Spain's torrid growth rate is matched only in some developing countries of Africa and Asia where birth rates tend to be much higher than in Europe, immigration expert Joaquin Arango of Madrid's Complutense University was quoted as saying by the newspaper El Pais.
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