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16,801 more people came to the Basque Country than left in 2008, which meant a 5% increase in the migratory balance with respect to 2007, according to Eustat data. This is the ninth consecutive year where a positive migratory balance was registered for the Basque Country.

By provinces, Bizkaia, which gained 8,792 people, had the highest migratory balance in absolute figures and it was up 3% compared to 2007. Gipuzkoa, which gained 3,655 people, increased its balance by 13% with respect to the previous year. Álava gained 4,354 people, which was down 1%.

With regard to the movement between the Basque Country and the other Autonomous Communities, there was a positive balance of 1,898 people in 2008. It was the first year, since Eustat started publishing this statistics, when there were more immigrations to the Basque Country from other Autonomous Communities than emigrations from it.

9% of the Basque population changed their place of residence in some way during 2008. Mobility within the Basque Country accounted for 66% cases, while the rest of the mobility originated from outside the community.

In total, 194,066 changes in the normal place of residence were recorded in the Basque Country:

- Of this figure, 88,311 corresponded to a change in residence within the same municipality.

- Intra-community mobility, which is to say movements whose origin and destination were different municipalities within the Basque Country, accounted for 44,176 movements.

- Likewise, 39,190 cases of extra-community or external immigration were recorded, which are those whose origin was in a municipality outside the Community and whose destination is the Basque Country.

- Finally, there were 22,389 cases of external or extra-community emigration, in other words, residential variations originating in a municipality of the Community and with the destination outside it, with 3,400 of them moving abroad.

External geographical mobility, which involved 28.7 per thousand inhabitants of the Basque Country (Álava 36.5‰, Bizkaia 28.7‰ and Gipuzkoa 25.1‰) in 2008, was relatively small if compared to the other autonomous communities, where 44 per thousand inhabitants moved on average.

The autonomous communities that contributed more population to the Basque Country than received from the latter were Andalusia, Catalonia, Comunidad Valenciana, Murcia, Canary Islands, Castila la Mancha and Aragón were the Autonomous Communities.

The autonomous communities that were a pole of attraction for the emigrants of the Basque Country were in this order: Cantabria, Castilla y León, Madrid, Navarra, Catalonia and Andalusia. These six were the destination of 66% of the people who leave our Community.

The number of foreign immigrants came to 26,515 in 2008 (35% of whom came to the Basque Country from other Autonomous Communities) and accounted for 68% of the entries into our Community. It is the first time, since 2000, when there was a drop in the number of foreign immigrants moving to the Basque Country, specifically, 8% less than in 2007. In 2008, 9,283 foreign immigrants were recorded as moving to the Basque Country from other autonomous communities, which was 30% up on the previous year.

As far as the level of education was concerned, 50% of the immigrants and 51% of the emigrants had completed primary education, while there was no difference in the percentages of immigrants and emigrants who had completed higher or further education (19% in both cases).

The average age of the emigrants (34.5 years old) was higher than that of the immigrants (31.1 years old). If the gender variable of the population in question is taken into account, 56% of immigrants were men and 44% women, while there difference between the sexes was lower in the case of emigrants (52% men and 48% women).