For more than a century, as in many other European countries, the Spanish non-metropolitan areas have been affected by a decline and abandonment process because of the outward migration flows. After the recovery from the hardest years of the Spanish postwar period (1940-1959), the demographic loss has been constant, even endangering the survival of the population entities and local communities. However, at the same time, many of these left-behind rural areas began to receive international immigrants from less developed countries since the end of the 20th century, who have guaranteed the agricultural production in much of Spain._x000D_
These workers gained visibility in two recent moments. Firstly, after the economic crisis of 2008 and onward, when many of them lost their jobs, at a time when this activity had allowed them to develop rooting strategies and, more recently, with the immobility caused by the pandemic. Despite this, the strong structural dependence of migrant labor in the agricultural sector favored the resilience capability of these workers. Consequently, this paper aims to offer a comparative analysis of the labor situation of migrants in agricultural work at both critical moments. This perspective will indirectly inform us of the opportunity that mobility represents for the development of left-behind rural areas._x000D_
With this aim, the sources used for this research are: i) the Social Security affiliation data and ii) the Continuous Sample of Working Lives, the latter revealing itself as a source of great interest. A treatment of descriptive statistics and georeferencing will be developed with these collected data._x000D_

*Antía Domínguez-Rodríguez; *Antía Pérez-Caramés; *Sandra López-Pereiro; **Josefina Domínguez-Mujica
*Universidade da Coruña; **University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

 
ID Abstract: 472