Immigration and demographic change in the metropolitan area of Madrid

The paper analyzes the evolution of the population and its dynamic components in the metropolitan area of Madrid between 1996 and 2006. Work has been done with data from the Municipal Population Census and the Movement of Natural Population. Since they were introduced a new stage of demographic trends, consistent with the processes that are occurring in all major Spanish cities. It presents a revival of their growth rates and the emergence of a new process of recentralization, who lives with a scattering peripheral increasingly pronounced. To explain these two patterns, contradictory in principle, it goes to the influx of foreigners as a major player in the revitalization and their behavior on their spatial distribution, which explains the demographic recovery in the traditional metropolitan area. Meanwhile, the national population continues protagonizando the process of scattering in the large metropolitan peri-urban periphery.