Survey Says: 85% of Spaniards Expect Migrants to Adapt — Reflections from Galicia
A grounded look at how language, policy, and daily life shape integration in Spain — and how Galicia’s bilingual and migratory history offers a mirror for understanding belonging in practice.
In October 2025, El Correo Gallego reported the results of a GESOP survey that landed squarely in the middle of Spain’s long-running conversation about immigration. More than 85 percent of Spaniards said migrants should “commit to learning the language and adapting to the norms of coexistence.” At face value, that response sounds like common sense: every community needs a shared vocabulary for daily life. Yet when you unpack the data, the reality grows more layered.
Support for the statement was highest among 18- to 29-year-olds (92 percent), dipping gradually with age to 80 percentamong those 60 and older. Regionally, Catalonia topped the list (91 percent), while the Canary Islands (80 percent)and the Basque Country (81 percent) marked the lower end. Party affiliation followed predictable lines, with the highest demands for assimilation coming from the right: Vox 94 percent, PP 94 percent, PSOE 81 percent, Sumar 63 percent. (El Periódico / El Correo Gallego, 12 Oct 2025.)
What matters is what integration looks like to Spaniards when they invoke “language” and “norms of coexistence.” In practice, those words compress two expectations: functional communication — being able to navigate work, school, health care, and bureaucracy — and a shared grasp of everyday social codes, the small contracts that make public life predictable.
The regional differences suggest how those expectations are formed. In Catalonia, where language and identity have long been intertwined, the call for linguistic adaptation is almost constitutional: a marker of civic belonging. In the Canary Islands, shaped by tourism economies and circular migration, tolerance for multilingual coexistence tends to be higher. In the Basque Country, historic bilingualism complicates any single-language prescription. And the generational gap — unexpected to some — often reflects proximity to multilingual spaces: classrooms, service jobs, and workplaces where coordination across languages is part of daily life, not ideology.
Read this way, the GESOP finding is not merely a call for “effort.” It’s a portrait of how Spaniards imagine everyday order — what they expect communication and coexistence to feel like: legible at the counter, comprehensible in the classroom, mutually understandable on the street. The deeper question, and the one that LiveGalicia confronts daily, is not whether effort is needed, but who is responsible for building the scaffolding that makes that effort possible.
Integration Is Not Citizenship
Spain already embeds formal expectations of linguistic and civic knowledge. To obtain nationality, applicants must pass two standardized tests administered by the Instituto Cervantes: the DELE A2 exam, certifying basic Spanish proficiency, and the CCSE, which measures familiarity with constitutional principles, geography, and social customs.
But by the time most immigrants reach that stage, they’ve already completed an unacknowledged curriculum. Long before the exam room, integration unfolds in the waiting room — at the centro de salud, in the tax office, or on the parent WhatsApp thread where school reminders appear in colloquial Spanish peppered with emojis and regional slang.
Integration starts not with policy but with paperwork: the first attempt to fill a form, the first phone call to a landlord, the first misunderstanding at a pharmacy. It’s a process measured less by milestones than by endurance. Every errand becomes a test of fluency, patience, and confidence.
For many, citizenship never arrives. The legal status is only one, often unreachable, expression of belonging. Yet by the time a person has navigated Spain’s administrative labyrinth, rented housing, enrolled a child, and learned the etiquette of a cafetería, they have already completed a social naturalization that no exam captures.
Across the European Union, roughly 60 percent of immigrants self-report advanced proficiency in their host-country language (OECD & European Commission, 2023). Spain sits near that average, but averages blur disparities. The returns on language proficiency depend heavily on class and gender. A 2017 study by Rodríguez & García found that immigrants fluent in Spanish earned 17 percent more on average, but the benefit accrued almost entirely to those already holding university degrees or formal contracts.
For others — particularly women in domestic or caregiving jobs, agricultural workers, or informal laborers — the economic incentive is weaker and the obstacles steeper. Shift work leaves no margin for classes; childcare and transport costs often exceed what a free course saves; exhaustion outweighs motivation. Integration, in practice, maps onto inequality: the fewer resources one has, the harder it is to “comply” with expectations designed around people who have disposable time, stable schedules, and quiet rooms to study in.
That burden falls disproportionately on women. Across Spain, foreign-born women make up the backbone of paid and unpaid care work — cleaners, nannies, home health aides, elder caregivers — yet they often function as the family’s informal interpreters and cultural translators. Their Spanish may develop in the most intimate settings: doctor visits, parent-teacher meetings, bureaucratic appointments. It’s relational learning rather than classroom learning — linguistic competence built through necessity, emotion, and repetition. But because it happens outside formal spaces, it remains invisible to statistics.
The picture grows more complex in regions like Galicia, where many newcomers already speak Spanish but still face an unspoken “second integration.” Latin Americans — especially Venezuelans, Colombians, and Argentinians — arrive with linguistic fluency, but accent, vocabulary, and bureaucratic unfamiliarity mark them as outsiders nonetheless. Meanwhile, retornados — Galician descendants returning from Cuba, Switzerland, or Uruguay — often discover that the Spain of their childhood stories no longer exists. Their challenge is not learning the language but re-learning its rhythms, its codes, its institutions.
In both cases, linguistic familiarity can mask deeper forms of adaptation: navigating digital bureaucracy, understanding unwritten norms, or finding social acceptance beyond stereotypes. The expectation of instant integration — “you already speak Spanish” — collides with the reality of layered belonging.
In that sense, integration policy often presumes privilege. It asks for demonstration of effort without recognizing structural constraint. A person who survives Spain’s bureaucracy without fluent Spanish has arguably exhibited more determination than one who aces the DELE exam with the help of private tutors. Yet our public language — about “adaptation,” “commitment,” “effort” — rarely acknowledges that distinction.
Citizenship, then, is not the pinnacle of integration but its bureaucratic shadow. Belonging happens long before the passport, and for many, without it.
The Privilege — and Paradox — of Non-Integration
At the opposite pole from those who struggle to integrate lies a quieter privilege: the ability not to.
Across Spain’s major urban centres — and increasingly in Galicia’s coastal towns — entire micro-economies allow foreigners to live comfortably in English, French, or German. Remote employment, international schools, imported-goods stores, and social-media enclaves create a self-sufficient ecosystem in which Spanish, and certainly Galician, becomes optional.
This linguistic insulation is not read as failure; it’s marketed as cosmopolitanism. The cleaner who struggles with forms is described as unintegrated, while the consultant who speaks no Spanish is called international. The distinction reveals less about culture than about class. Those least compelled to learn the language are the ones least blamed for not doing so.
To ignore that asymmetry is to mistake privilege for effort. Non-integration is not a single phenomenon. It has two faces — each shaped by different forms of power and limitation.
The Two Faces of Non-Integration
The instict to value language and coexistence as a part of foreigners is sound. Simultaneously though the demand for integration must be applied fairly, with recognition that people fail — or choose not — to integrate for very different reasons.
Non-Integration by Structural Barrier
This form overwhelmingly affects migrants from low-income or historically marginalised regions — North Africa, parts of Latin America, Eastern Europe. For them, non-integration is rarely a choice. It is the by-product of long work hours, low pay, and limited access to education or transport. A woman cleaning houses in three municipalities can’t attend a free Spanish course that meets at 7 p.m. on the other side of town. The economic incentive is small; the exhaustion is immense.
Non-Integration by Economic Privilege
The second form affects those who can afford to opt out. Spain’s lifestyle appeal and EU mobility framework have drawn tens of thousands of affluent Europeans — Britons, Germans, Dutch, Scandinavians — who can sustain daily life in English. Their work, pensions, or savings are transnational. The supermarket stocks their foods, the clinic staff speak their language, and their social circles reproduce familiar routines. For them, linguistic detachment is not resistance; it’s redundancy.
Public debate often trains its anxiety on the first group while overlooking the second. Yet much of the measurable non-integration — especially the decision not to pursue citizenship or learn Spanish beyond basic phrases — comes from those with the freedom not to depend on Spain’s institutions.
The Data Behind the Divide
Although Spain’s national statistics rarely disaggregate by language proficiency, several patterns illuminate the structural gap.
Low Naturalisation Rate among EU Nationals
Eurostat data show that EU citizens are four to five times less likely than non-EU residents to acquire Spanish nationality. For wealthier Northern Europeans, citizenship offers little practical advantage: EU law already guarantees mobility and property rights. The decision not to naturalise thus signals not hostility but sufficiency — the system already works for them.
Demographic Profile of Lifestyle Migrants
Among British residents — one of Spain’s largest Northern European groups — the socioeconomic pattern is clear. By 2016, 40 percent were aged 65 or older, more than double the share a decade earlier.Census data show nearly half were retired, with just one in five working. Many settled in concentrated enclaves along the Mediterranean — Costa del Sol, Costa Blanca — where English-speaking networks dominate social and economic life. Their pensions and property ownership provide stability, while private health insurance and expatriate services insulate them from the Spanish state.
Contrast with Third-Country Nationals (TCNs)
For immigrants from Morocco, Romania, or Latin America, the equation reverses. Economic survival depends on local labour markets and administrative compliance. Spanish proficiency increases employability and legal stability; naturalisation grants protection from precarity. For these groups, integration is not an aesthetic preference but a necessity.
This comparison underscores that non-integration is stratified by class. Where lower-income migrants are constrained by barriers, wealthier ones are cushioned by choice. Both groups inhabit Spain, but on different terms.
Understanding Without Condemning
To name this disparity is not to moralise it. The British retiree and the Moroccan farmworker are both negotiating belonging, each within the limits and comforts of their own circumstances. What differs is the structure around them.
The challenge for Spain — and for regions like Galicia — is not to assign blame but to align expectations with reality. Integration policy must recognise that effort requires access, and that privilege carries responsibility.
Fluency is not a prerequisite for dignity, but independence should not be a justification for detachment. The point is not to police how people live, but to ensure that coexistence remains mutual rather than parallel — shared streets, not separate worlds.
Galicia’s Bilingual Terrain and the Mirror It Holds
In Galicia, as in other regions of Spain with co-official languages, integration has an additional layer. Two languages coexist uneasily: Spanish, the administrative default, and Galician, the emotional and cultural anchor. For newcomers, the choice is rarely ideological — it’s practical. Spanish is essential for paperwork; Galician signals belonging.
In Vigo, A Coruña, and Santiago, most new arrivals begin in Spanish and gradually absorb Galician through schools or workplaces. In smaller towns, the pattern reverses: neighbours greet in Galician first, Spanish later.Among digital nomads and foreign professionals, English often replaces both. These overlapping spheres create a subtle hierarchy of legitimacy.To speak Galician — even imperfectly — is read as respect; to ignore it entirely, as detachment. Learning it requires immersion and context that formal courses seldom provide.
Along the Rías Baixas and in Galicia’s inland towns, these linguistic nuances intersect with deep social divides. Latin-American families, Eastern European tradesmen, and North-African workers sustain the region’s service, agricultural, and care sectors.At the same time, a visible influx of Northern-European retirees, remote professionals, and digital nomads is reshaping Galicia’s coastline and urban economies. Both groups are part of Galicia’s evolving demography — but their experiences of “integration” couldn’t be more different.
For working-class migrants, integration is an act of endurance: navigating bureaucracy, working long hours in Spanish, and learning the region’s unwritten rules in real time. For privileged newcomers, integration is optional — more a matter of curiosity than survival. Language becomes symbolic capital: a gesture of interest, not a condition of access.
Walk through Vigo’s coworking spaces, and you’ll hear English as the lingua franca. In cafés, menus in English outnumber those in Galician. Meanwhile, immigrant-run shops in the same neighbourhoods use Spanish or Galician as functional tools of daily life, switching between both to meet customers where they are. These linguistic and economic microclimates coexist within blocks of each other but rarely overlap.
Neither world is wrong; both are real. But when they run in parallel rather than in dialogue, Galicia’s social fabric risks thinning into polite distance: a patchwork of neighbours who coexist without connection.
This is where LiveGalicia’s work begins: creating intentional spaces where these realities meet. Our community events, advisory circles, and integration guides are built around one principle — that coexistence requires contact. We aim to lower the barriers for those who struggle to participate fully while encouraging those who move through Galicia easily to engage more deeply. Integration here isn’t about dissolving difference but acknowledging interdependence — the shared interest in a region that feels livable, not just scenic.
LiveGalicia’s community mapping reveals this plurality clearly:
- Returnees move between nostalgia and adaptation, rediscovering a homeland that feels both familiar and foreign.
- Latin-American newcomers share a language but not always social capital, often surprised to find how regional culture and bureaucracy diverge from their expectations.
- Retirees and remote workers live comfortably but often within linguistic and social bubbles — independent, yet isolated.
In that sense, integration in Galicia is plural by definition. Its bilingualism isn’t unique, but it is instructive — a living example of how coexistence works when identities overlap rather than replace each other.
Galicia’s history of migration and return has trained it for this work: to adapt, absorb, and stay itself all at once.
Comparative Frames: What Other Countries Teach Us About Integration
Across most developed countries, the pattern is strikingly consistent: expectations are nearly universal, but support is uneven. Governments expect newcomers to acquire the language and understand civic norms, yet the means to do so vary dramatically depending on where one lands.
In Germany, integration is institutionalised through the Integrationskurs — 600 hours of language instruction plus 100 hours of civic orientation, subsidised or free under the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF). Successful completion can shorten the path to permanent residence. Germany’s system is widely cited as a model because it embeds learning in law while keeping access broad and affordable.
The Netherlands requires a similar investment through its Inburgering program. Most migrants must reach B1 Dutch within three years, with allowances to step down to A2 after roughly 600 documented hours of coursework. The Dutch state enforces the rule strictly but supports it with a nationwide network of accredited courses, exams, and online materials.
France formalises its expectations through the Contrat d’Intégration Républicaine (CIR). By signing it, newcomers commit to attending language and civics classes; in turn, the state provides free instruction and links the contract to residence-permit renewal. The emphasis is on republican values — laïcité, equality, rights, and duties — but the funding is uneven and often centralised around major cities.
The United Kingdom blends language with cultural literacy. Applicants for settlement or citizenship must demonstrate B1 English proficiency and pass the Life in the UK test — a 24-question exam covering history, institutions, and everyday knowledge. Critics point out that the test measures memory more than integration, but its symbolic function is clear: to affirm shared reference points.
Canada approaches integration as public investment rather than private obligation. The federal government funds Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) nationwide, delivered through community colleges and settlement agencies. For citizenship, applicants aged 18–54 must demonstrate Canadian Language Benchmark (CLB) Level 4 — basic conversational ability in English or French. Canada’s model aligns access with accountability: the state expects progress but finances the tools to achieve it.
The United States takes the opposite approach, postponing assessment until the final step. Language and civics are tested only during the naturalisation interview — an oral English exam and a short quiz drawn from 128 questions on history and government. For decades, integration has been treated as an individual endeavour rather than a state responsibility, leaving outcomes largely to local nonprofits and churches.
Further afield, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, and Norway all link permanent residence or citizenship to language proficiency — typically A2 to B1 — and basic civic knowledge. In the Nordic countries, completion of approved courses is mandatory; failure to meet the requirement can delay or deny residency.
Across these cases, the difference is structural, not ideological. Where integration policies pair obligation with access — Germany’s subsidised courses, Canada’s publicly funded programs — linguistic outcomes improve and public support remains high. Where the expectation is imposed without infrastructure — as in France’s rural regions or Spain’s fragmented system — the requirement becomes punitive rather than empowering.
Spain, by comparison, stands out as strong on principle but weak on scaffolding. The legal framework affirms equality and participation, but delivery depends on under-resourced municipalities and NGOs. Language instruction for adults is often volunteer-run, unevenly distributed, and chronically underfunded. In effect, Spain asks for the same effort other countries demand — just without the tools to make it possible.
Comparative Reflection — What Galicia Teaches, and What It Learned Abroad
If Spain can draw inspiration from other models, Galicia offers something rarer: lived memory. For more than a century, it was Galicians — not foreigners — who navigated the tests of language, bureaucracy, and belonging abroad. Between the mid-19th century and the 1960s, more than two million Galicians left their homeland, most bound for Latin America — Argentina, Uruguay, Cuba, Venezuela — while others went to Switzerland, France, or Germany.
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Those migrations forged a pattern of dual integration: Galicians learned host-country languages to survive, yet kept Galician as a private inheritance. Over time, they built schools, cultural centres, and sociedades gallegas that preserved language and customs while adapting to local systems. A study by Martín Fernández Sánchez (Mass Emigration and Human Capital over a Century, 2023) shows that although early emigration depleted Galicia’s human capital, over decades the remittances and values migrants sent back — especially around education — actually increased literacy and investment in local schooling. Migration, paradoxically, taught Galicia how to educate itself.
Today’s retornados and descendants replay that story in reverse. Many were born abroad — grandchildren of those who left — and have now returned to a region that feels both inherited and new. Research by Ponte and Sánchez (2024), Transgenerational Return Migration to Galicia: Discourses of Identity and Belonging, finds that for this group, language again mediates identity: Spanish serves as the tool of administration; Galician, as a symbol of emotional continuity. Returnees’ integration is less about assimilation and more about recalibration — learning how to inhabit a place they already claim.
This transatlantic history complicates any simple idea of “integration.” Galicians abroad often thrived because they created parallel systems of support — associations, cooperatives, informal language tutoring — that functioned as social infrastructure long before governments offered it. The descendants returning today carry that same ethos of adaptation. Their stories remind us that migration is rarely one-directional: the skills of integrating abroad and reintegrating at home are two sides of the same collective memory.
That experience is precisely why Galicia can model a more nuanced approach to integration today. Its history teaches that language and belonging are reciprocal. The host must make space; the newcomer must take part. When either side withdraws, coexistence falters. When both engage — through institutions, through daily kindness, through shared patience — belonging deepens.
Integration as Relationship
Policy defines the scaffolding of integration, but people live its consequences. Every regulation, requirement, or funding decision eventually takes form in a waiting room, a classroom, or a conversation between two people trying to understand each other. Integration, in that sense, is not a checklist of obligations but an evolving relationship between individual effort and institutional design.
Across Spain, and particularly in Galicia, the rhythm of integration mirrors the rhythm of public systems: how long it takes to register with the local health centre, how easily one finds a language course, how often offices can adapt to people still learning the grammar of paperwork.
Each of these moments quietly shapes trust — the real currency of belonging.
When integration frameworks are well resourced, contact becomes cooperation. When resources are limited, coexistence depends on improvisation and good will: the administrator who explains a form twice, the teacher who adjusts her pace, the neighbour who helps translate a message. These small gestures sustain a social architecture that policy alone cannot build.
Spain’s national plans for inclusion are clear in purpose and generous in tone. Implementation, however, depends on regional and municipal capacity — producing a mosaic of outcomes that varies sharply across geography. Some areas have developed mature networks of language instruction, mediation, and employment pathways; others rely on underfunded community organisations or volunteers. What emerges is not failure but asymmetry: a map of uneven opportunity.
From Expectation to Enabling
If most Spaniards believe newcomers should learn the language and adapt to local norms, that instinct reflects an understandable wish for mutual intelligibility. What matters is whether people have the time, support, and institutional access to meet those expectations.
In countries where obligation is paired with opportunity — Germany’s subsidised courses, Canada’s LINC programs, the Netherlands’ structured inburgering model — language proficiency rises and social cohesion tends to follow. Where the responsibility is personal but the infrastructure is thin, the same expectation can become burdensome.
In Spain, access to adult education depends heavily on local availability and funding. Municipalities and NGOs carry much of the weight, often through short-term projects or unpaid staff. Teachers of Spanish as a second language, intercultural mediators, and community interpreters sustain essential services with little institutional stability. The result is continuity in principle but fragility in practice.
Galicia adds an extra layer: bilingualism enriches identity but complicates implementation. Teaching Spanish to newcomers while promoting Galician in schools requires planning and investment, not merely enthusiasm. Without consistent support, the call for newcomers to “learn the language” risks sounding aspirational rather than achievable.
Integration as Shared Infrastructure
What emerges from these observations is not a deficit but an invitation: integration succeeds when states treat it as shared infrastructure rather than a private endeavour. Germany and Canada do this through sustained national funding. Spain approaches it more through moral consensus — broad agreement that integration matters, delivered through local improvisation. The difference is structural, not ideological, but its impact is real.
In Galicia, this dynamic plays out daily. Foreign residents who want to belong find motivation but not always means; others, equipped with economic independence, can remain comfortable without contact.
Bridging that gap requires policy that supports learning and social participation as public goods — not just responsibilities for individuals.
Belonging as Reciprocity
Galicia’s own history makes this conversation cyclical.
For generations, Galicians abroad became the foreigners they now welcome. They learned new languages, built associations, and returned transformed. That collective memory remains embedded in Galicia’s social fabric — a quiet understanding that integration is rarely one-directional.
It is built through the patience of both host and newcomer, through institutions that mediate but also through ordinary acts of proximity.
LiveGalicia’s work is part of that lineage. We don’t speak for newcomers or returnees but helps make their experiences visible. Through dialogue, research, and everyday practice, we maps how integration happens in real life — across bilingualism, bureaucracy, and the blurred lines of belonging.
What emerges is not critique but continuity: the same story Galicia once lived elsewhere, now unfolding at home.
Integration, in the end, is not a test but a relationship — between systems and citizens, expectations and access, difference and empathy.
Bibliography
Spain and Galicia
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https://www.elcorreogallego.es/sociedad/2025/10/12/encuesta-inmigracion-lengua-idioma-normas-convivencia-122551267.html - INE — Instituto Nacional de Estadística. Migraciones y Población Extranjera, 2024.
https://www.ine.es - Ministerio de Inclusión, Seguridad Social y Migraciones. Plan Estratégico de Ciudadanía e Integración (PECI) 2023–2027.
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https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4267207 - Ponte, S., & Sánchez, L. (2024). Transgenerational Return Migration to Galicia, Spain: Discourses of Identity and Belonging. ResearchGate.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382367307_Transgenerational_Return_Migration_to_Galicia_Spain_Discourses_of_Identity_and_Belonging - The Guardian. (2023, January 3). “I feel at home here”: descendants of Galicia’s emigrés return to the old country.
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Canada
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https://www.statcan.gc.ca
United States
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Nordic and Oceanic Countries
- Government of Denmark. Integration Policy and Danish Language Requirements. https://www.nyidanmark.dk
- Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI). Norwegian Language and Social Studies Requirements for Permanent Residence. https://www.udi.no
- Australian Department of Home Affairs. Australian Citizenship: Language and Knowledge Test.
https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au - New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs. Citizenship Language and Knowledge Requirements.
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Sociological and Conceptual Sources
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- MiCREATE Project. (2021). Integration of Migrant Children in Educational Systems in Spain: Stakeholders’ Views. https://micreate.eu
- European Commission. (2022). Action Plan on Integration and Inclusion 2021–2027. https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/policies/migration-and-asylum/legal-migration-and-integration/action-plan-integration-and-inclusion-2021-2027
Author: Ángela-Jo Touza-Medina, M.A., LL.M., is the founder of LiveGalicia and a global nonprofit and social-impact consultant. An experienced workforce strategy and DEIB advocate, and a recognised immigrant-integration facilitator, she is also the author of A Single Mother by Choice: A Journal for Solo Moms. Her work sits at the intersection of equity, migration, and organisational resilience.
At LiveGalicia, we don’t build expat enclaves — we build bridges. Our work empowers foreigners, digital nomads, immigrants, and returning emigrants to connect, integrate, and truly thrive in Galicia. The focus is on acculturation, cultural literacy, and community connection, so newcomers step into Galicia not as spectators but as participants. Through tailored resources, networking opportunities, and initiatives like Galipreneur Connect, we bridge cultural gaps, foster entrepreneurship and investment, and create spaces where individuals and families alike can build meaningful connections. LiveGalicia is about more than settling in; it’s about belonging in Galicia’s vibrant landscape.
P.S. To listen to the firsthand stories of people who decided to make Galicia home, listen to the LiveGalicia Podcast
