Immigrants are “principal explanation”
For the first time in two decades, the number of children under the age of 15 has started to increase in Portugal.
2023 saw 3,000 more children than in the year before, reports statistics institute INE.
The last time the country started “gaining children of these ages was 2003″, reports Expresso – “but one has to go back almost 50 years, to 1977, to find a year where the increase was higher”.
Immigration, which is also contributing to the number of births and inhabitants, is the principal reason for this increase, at a time when the country is also registering a migratory flux even greater than the ‘wave of retornados’ (Portuguese returning from the colonies) in the aftermath of the April 25, 1974 revolution.
Demographic expert Maria João Valente Rosa tells Expresso: “Looking at the age structure of the Portuguese population, and the way it has evolved over the last year, we see something exceptional in our recent history. There is an increase in people, both young and middle aged, due to the very considerable number of entries into Portugal” by foreigners (from various countries).
The country currently has 1.36 million youngsters under the age of 15. But while this number is larger than it has been for years, it still doesn’t change the fact that the population as a whole is still aging faster than it is renewing. There are 2.5 million (of the 10.6 million total number of inhabitants) who are over the age of 65, accounting for 24% of the population.
That said, the active population has also increased between 2022 and 2023 “inverting a tendency registered over the last decade”, says Expresso.
The last time that the number of people between the ages of 15 and 64 grew was in 2009, but one has to go back 40 years to find a year in which the increase in the active workforce was greater than that of 2023 (+55,000 people, for a workforce of 6.68 million).
Again, immigration is the explanation: in 2022, half the people who came to live in Portugal were aged between 20 and 44 – meaning they were not only of ‘active working age’, but likely to have children, and so increase the country’s demographics.
Other records of 2023…
Children born to foreign mothers represented more than a fifth (22%) of all births in Portugal in 2023. In numbers, there were almost 19,000 babies born to foreign mothers – the highest number ever, says Expresso, and responsible for the total number of babies being born in this country ‘growing’.
Were it not for the foreign babies, Portugal’s birth rate would have dipped even further. A graph published in Expresso today shows that the country’s birthrate has been plummeting since the year 2000 (when around 110,000 babies were born to Portuguese mothers, compared to 2023’s 66,964).
Other countries are showing very much the same tendency. Expresso cites Germany, where foreign mothers are also having three, even four children – while the number of babies born to German mothers last year was the lowest in the last decade. ND
Source material: Expresso
