Ikke noe europeisk land tok inn flere utenlandske arbeidere enn Spania. Nå er landet i dyp økonomisk krise og innvandrerne mister jobbene først. En del reiser tilbake til feks. Ekvador, men mange velger å bli pga gratis helsevesen og fri skole.

During the prosperous decade that ended in 2007, Spain maintained one of Europe’s most accommodating immigration policies, as it sought laborers for surging construction and service industries. Partly thanks to an amnesty for illegal immigrants, easy procedures for immigrants to bring over family members and aggressive foreign recruitment, immigrants filled an estimated 40% of the six million jobs Spain created between 1997 and 2007, according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates.

Over the past decade, Spain’s foreign-born population has grown more than 500%, to just over 5.7 million, comprising more than 12% of the population. Latin America is the largest regional source of immigrants, but Romania and Morocco are the top two individual sending countries, followed by Ecuador.

When Spain’s construction-dependant economy cratered amid the global financial crisis, the government sharply curtailed foreign-worker recruitment programs, limited family reunifications and stiffened penalties on employers of illegal immigrants. Spain created a Voluntary Return Program, paying accumulated unemployment benefits as an incentive to get legal immigrants to go home.

Immigrants have borne the brunt of job losses and their unemployment rate has shot up to 30%, from 12% in 2007, compared with the 20% national average.
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The number of Ecuadorans living in Spain fell 26,357 in 2009, to 395,069, according to municipal registry rolls—considered the most reliable tally of immigrants in Spain. Overall, Spain’s foreign-born population grew just 1% in 2009, compared with 17% in 2007, according to municipal data. (Even in deep recessions, it is extremely rare for a country to experience a decline in its foreign-born population, said Jonathan Chaloff, OECD migration analyst.)

Spanish Downturn Sparks Immigrant Exodus