The number of foreign residents who acquired Spanish nationality increased by 26.1% in 2022. Moroccans lead the naturalized population and their number amounts to more than 55,000 people, says the Spanish National Institute of Statistics.
In 2022, 181,581 foreigners residing in Spain acquired Spanish nationality. This figure thus represents an increase of 26.1% compared to the previous year, specifies the Spanish National Institute of Statistics in a press release.
According to the same source, it turns out that Moroccans rank first in the list of foreign residents who have obtained Spanish nationality, with a total of 55,463 people naturalized in 2022, including 23,335 born outside Spain.
In addition to Moroccans, the main beneficiaries are of Colombian origin with 11,125 naturalized and Ecuadorian with 10,845 people. Next come other nationalities from South and Central America and the Caribbean. Eight of the ten most frequent cases correspond to countries in these regions. For Asian countries, Pakistan stands out with 6,400 beneficiaries.
As for the distribution by gender, 47% of foreigners who acquired Spanish nationality in 2022 were men, while the other 53% are women. By age, people under the age of 10 were the largest group, followed by the 30-39 age group. Moreover, of the 181,581 people residing in Spain who acquired citizenship in the same year, 30.3% have always resided in Spain. The remaining 69.7% had previously resided abroad.
Regarding the geographical distribution in the Iberian territory, Catalonia leads with 48,901 cases, followed by Madrid with 41,456 and together represent 49.8% of the acquisitions of Spanish nationality in 2022. For their part, Extremadura (760 beneficiaries) and La Rioja (1,083) are the Autonomous Communities that recorded the lowest number of acquisitions of nationality among their residents.
Regarding the resident foreign population at the beginning of 2022, the highest figures were observed in the Region of Murcia (4.7% of foreign nationals acquired citizenship), the Community of Madrid (4. 5%) and the Basque Country (4.0%). On the other hand, the lowest percentages were recorded in Extremadura (2.1%), the Canary Islands (2.2%) and Andalusia (2.2%).
As a reminder, Moroccans constituted the largest group among the new citizens of the European Union. They were 86,200 out of the 827,000 people to have acquired the citizenship of a European state in 2021, including Spanish, French, Swedish, Dutch and Italian nationality, among others.