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Approximately 3.3M immigrants living in Spain were born in Latin America. When looking at the numbers, we weren't surprised that Spain has the largest LatAm population in Europe, given the shared tongue and cultural roots. Just like it isn't surprising that most foreign-born Portugal residents are from Brazil.

What did surprise us is how few Mexicans returned to their past colonizer — only 66K, or 2% of the 3.3M total. Spain is home to fewer Mexicans than Hondurans, Paraguayans, and even Uruguayans, countries with just a fraction of Mexico's population.

The main reason is simple geography — given Mexico's shared border, the US is the obvious country of choice for migrants.

Colombia is the largest Latin American population (and the third overall) living in Spain. From 1999 to 2004, that population grew 18x from 13K to 249K. What happened? In addition to Colombia's economic hardship in the 90s, an earthquake broke havoc on Colombia's Andes mountains in 1999, which killed more than 1,000 people and destroyed 8,000 coffee "fincas," leaving thousands displaced. Venezuelans fleeing Maduro's dictatorship in recent years led a new wave of migration — multiplying their number by 4x from 2015 to 2021.

Another surprising statistic from the data is that Peruvians are Italy's top Latin American demographic. Ties between both countries extend back to the colonial period when Italians became part of Peru's ruling class and even placed their own Virrey, Carmine Nicolao Caracciolo, in 1716.

Similarly to Colombia and Venezuela, during the socioeconomic hardships of the 90s, thousands of Peruvians (many of Italian descent) fled to rediscover their family origins. And the migrant flow goes both ways — in contemporary Peru, Italian descendants and migrants continue to play an important role.

Source: Wikipedia
Tools: Rawgraphs, Affinity Designer

I'm not a fan of "Other" being the largest chunk of a pie chart

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The chart shows the percentage of Latin American immigrants living in Italy that are from select Latin American countries. It doesn't cover where Italians emigrate to.

Do these numbers include people who gain citizenship via Jus Sanguinis?

I had a university teacher that was born Brazilian but had Italian citizenship via her grandfather.

Is Suriname not in LatAm? Otherwise Netherlands chart would def look different.

Edit:Cleary not as Wikipedia states 350k Suriname in NL, compared to 100k LatAm given here.

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The title inside the image is wrong. First, how is biggest country even defined? Population? Area? But in any case, the Netherlands is not part of the biggest five in either population or area.

And why is Portugal shown as well?

Tbh i don't think the case for Mexico is surprising at all

other than sharing a huge border with a big economic power several of the US southern states were part of mexico once, with deep cultural, linguistic and population links so why cross over an ocean?

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Poland would like a word... (Also Romania is more populated than NL, too).

Well they speak Dutch, so no.

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As a Colombian, I'm not impressed we're #1 in immigration. I myself want to move out as soon as I can.

I thought Argentinians would be up there

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I expected more people from mexico, then I remember most of us go to the US so no real reason for europe

It's interesting that no Brasilians go to Spain. I guess it makes sense with the proximity of Portugal, it probably feels more natural to speak their native language but I would have thought some percentage would still go there, especially with the large population of Brasil and the poverty/overcrowding in many places.

I think you meant surprised instead of impressed

I am not too. But in this case is quite normal: it means "other inmigrants no-latinoamericans". It says "% of total inmigrants". So that other are africans, asians, anglo-americans, etc.

It doesn't mean that, it means other latinoamérica countries not in the legend. Otherwise it would not make any sense.

Grey says "Other LatAm" in the legend. This chart exclusively shows Latin American immigrants to Europe, as a % of all Latin American immigrants.

I think this counts total number of migrants for most cases, not just people living in those countries with a foreign citizenship. That's for sure the case of Spain, those 3.3 million are the "latin american born" people, but over 1 million of them adquired spanish or other european citizenships already. Edit. It's not the case for Italy, but the numbers don't change much in most countries with the exception of Argentina which however continue having less migrants in Italy than those born in Peru, Brazil and Ecuador.

There are just not many argentines in Italy and even just focusing on italo-argentines, they seem to migrate to Spain mainly. Out of the 327.433 people born in Argentina and "legally" living in Spain, 63,571 use their italian citizenship vs 161k that adquired spanish citizenship, 93k still living only with argentine citizenship and 10k with others, mostly german, french and other EU ones (edit.) while in the case of Italy, there are 71k people born in Argentina, roughly 60k under italian citizenship and close to 10k with only argentine¡ one.

For Spain it seems to include all migrants, including those adquiring european citizenships.

Many brazilians go to Spain but they are included here in the grey "others" as they are less numerous than many hispanic american origins and even after bolivians, the least numerous among the origins explicitely mentioned here, it should follows cubans with 173k residents and only after brazilians with 155.963 people (56k already with spanish citizenship) as the 9th most numerous latin american origin.