Foreign-born internal migrants: Are they playing a different role than natives on income convergence in Spain?

The main purpose of this paper is to ascertain whether internal migration of foreign-born residents is behind the infant process of provincial income convergence that is taking place in Spain since 2001. In order to fulfil this goal, we propose a new approach within the Markov chain framework that enables us to explore the migration–convergence relationship. For the sake of comparison, this approach is applied to internal migration flows of both foreign-born and natives. The results obtained indicate that the increasingly larger share of foreign-born residents in internal migration is not the cause of the recent reactivation of the provincial convergence process. In addition, these results also reveal that differences between foreign-born and natives in the way they move within Spain do not have a significantly distinct effect on income convergence.