The burden of the border: Precarious citizenship experiences in the wake of the Spanish housing crash

Abstract

Beginning in the late 1990s, Spain experienced major changes in both its population structure and housing market. Between 1998 and 2008, the country’s immigrant population increased nearly 10-fold, from half a million foreign-born residents to five million, with the share of immigrant workers jumping from 2 per cent of all working-age people to 16 per cent. During this period, immigration accounted for the vast majority of Spain’s population growth, and this was reflected in the housing market by significant increases in the construction of new dwellings. However, the situation changed dramatically after the housing crash in 2008. In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008 and the collapse of the country’s housing bubble, a massive wave of evictions made housing precariousness and displacement salient sociopolitical issues in Spain. Through multiple regression analyses of data from the Spanish Living Conditions Survey, this study shows that households headed by non-European Union citizens were significantly more likely than those headed by Spanish citizens to experience higher levels of housing precariousness and displacement pressure, net of housing arrears and other relevant factors. Non-European Union citizens were also significantly more likely to experience rent overburden and were found to pay higher rents than Spanish citizens for similar dwellings. By putting these results in dialogue with the ethnographic and theoretical literature on housing struggles and everyday bordering, this article argues that the differentially precarious citizenship status of migrants in Spain facilitates housing practices that multiply and thicken urban borders and facilitate rent extraction.