From Bloomberg BusinessWeek in 2007:
Spain: Immigrants Welcome
May 20, 2007
Imagine what would happen if a prosperous Western nation threw open its borders, allowing immigrants to flood in virtually unchecked. Soaring unemployment, overstretched social services, rising crime, even rioting in the streets? Not in Spain.
Over the past decade, the traditionally homogeneous country has become a sort of open-door laboratory on immigration. Spain has absorbed more than 3 million foreigners from places as diverse as Romania, Morocco, and South America. More than 11% of the country's 44 million residents are now foreign-born, one of the highest proportions in Europe. With hundreds of thousands more arriving each year, Spain could soon reach the U.S. rate of 12.9%.
And it doesn't seem to have hurt much. Spain is Europe's best-performing major economy, with growth averaging 3.1% over the past five years. Since 2002, the country has created half the new jobs in the euro zone. Unemployment has plummeted from more than 20% in the 1990s to 8.6%, within shooting distance of the 7.2% euro zone average. The government attributes more than half this stellar performance to immigration. ...
Immigrants are weaving vitality into Spanish society, too. Stroll through Tetu??n, a vibrant multiethnic neighborhood in north central Madrid, and you'll find an Ecuadoran bakery, a Moroccan furniture shop, and an everything-for-1-euro store called Los Chinos because its owners are Chinese.
As we all know, massive immigration is Good for the Economy, so 2013 reports that the current unemployment rate in Spain is 27% are obviously falsehoods made up by evil nativists. Obviously, Spain's economic problem must be a lack of immigration. Immigration hasn't failed in Spain, it just hasn't been tried enough!
...an everything-for-1-euro store called Los Chinos because its owners are Chinese.
ReplyDeleteYes, one can imagine the fine merchandise available there. Locally sourced no doubt too -- 'Made in Spain'.
This kind of thing is economic marginality. It's what immigration predominantly brings. You see it also -- in spades -- up and down 'high streets' in England. Once the immigrant population reaches a certain threshold, you see these junk stores opening, selling you name it: cheap shoes, cheap furniture, etc etc. They sell this crap because it's all the rat poor population of their brethren can afford. Needless to say, it's a lovely thing to see.
And for young adults unemployment is much higher, even science-fictionally high: from roughly 20% in 2006 (the prelapsarian age!) it shot up to 56%, as of May 2013.
ReplyDeleteAs reported by my Spanish friend who visited Chicago over the summer, you are practically upper-middle class if you are in your 20s and just *have* a decent job.
Dam it Steve, I was going to write a comment about how ignorant you are of the reality of situation in Spain and how bad it has become since the 2008 crisis. Then I checked the date of the article. You got me.
ReplyDeleteAny way, this is a good strategy to show the foolishness of immigration proponents, pull up old articles such as this and point out the hypocrisy.
During the bubble Spain built a huge amount of new housing, partially in hopes rich retirees would make Spain a kind of European Florida. That does not seem to have happened fast enough to fill the empty spaces.
ReplyDeleteIceland (population less than 1% of Spain) had the same problem but seems to have filled the empty living spaces will Icelanders, evidently leading to a baby boom.
And it doesn't seem to have hurt much. Spain is Europe's best-performing major economy, with growth averaging 3.1% over the past five years.
ReplyDeleteFive, six, seven, eight...
...Not GDP overall, but GDP per capita.
Which mass immigration brings down. Sure you get higher GDP as the numerator, but a hell of a lot more "capitas" as the denominator.
Spain is a multi-ethnic society with dreadful fertility rates. There is also a large pool of kindred people in Latin America. The immigration calculus is going to be different for Spain than it is for France and Britain (where fertility rates are adequate) or Germany, Austria, and Italy (no kindred people anywhere).
ReplyDeleteIf only the Spaniards had remembered the words of Madrid-born George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." America too once enjoyed an immigrant-fueled economic boom, that came crashing down in the Great Depression, with 30% of workers unemployed.
ReplyDeleteThings didn't seem to be working out so great for those immigrants in that movie Biutiful.
ReplyDeleteSpain is a classic example of a housing bubble. You bring in an endless supply of cheap construction workers, mostly Moroccans and Romanians, which leads to housing demand to soar and also to native flight from the incoming hordes of foreigners, which in turn fuels a demand for cheap labour, and so forth.. Until banks overstretch their credit and everything goes down the tubes.Of course, taxpayers fot the bill as anywhere else. Banks cannot go bankrupt, but everybody else has to.
ReplyDeleteThe high rate of unemployment is also a result of 2 to 3 million foreign service workers, making it difficult for those laid off from contruction and industry to find a job.
Real unemployment is easily over 30% and rising. It´s not a recession, it´s a real economic depression, with negative growth and capital flight. Not to mention the brain drain: young Spaniards with a degree in STEM tend to leave, mostly for Germany and the US.
So you´re left with a sizable South America and African workforce, most of them unemployable in the 21th century.
"...Immigrants are weaving vitality into Spanish society..."
ReplyDeleteThey are weaving here, too...all over our roads.
And my drinking gam would have been better if "vitality" were "vibrancy" instead.
If, on some mythical day, the Powers That Be admit that mass immigration does not equal wealth... will there be a window where the skeptics can go and get their money back?
ReplyDeleteThese narratives always reduce everything down to commerce and whether money can be made; people are just so many interchangeable economic units. This is their mentality. It's never considered that people may actually want to live in an actual country with their own culture and way of life. Selling off the heritage that's been built up over the past thousand years or so, never to return, is what it is. Once it's gone it's gone.
ReplyDeleteWhat what I have been told by UK people resident in Spain, the economy is on the brink and social norms are breaking down.
ReplyDeleteMedia images and reality aren't drifting apart, they are powering apart.
GC
Greece also has one of the highest percentages of immigrants as a share of its population, and its economy, as we know, is humming along perfectly.
ReplyDeleteThat is some vibrant public debt, you have there, Spain...150
ReplyDelete"Madrid (AFP) - Spain's public debt will rise next year to 99.8 percent of output after hitting 94.2 percent at the end of this year, higher than previously forecast, according to details of the government's 2014 budget..."
http://news.yahoo.com/spain-public-debt-ratio-near-100-2014-114330765.html
Even if the economic argument is correct--and there had been no meltdown since 2008--, how is it a good thing to allow foreigners to swamp the nation of your forefathers out of existence?
ReplyDeleteAnd why does anyone need foreigners to eat foreign food? I think they got pizza in Japan and sushi in Mexico.
"a Moroccan furniture shop"
ReplyDeleteGosh, I feel so deprived because my town doesn't have one of those.
Globalist mentality: exoticism in consumerism. Let hordes of Moroccans in and maybe one will open a rug store where I can buy one to show off to my friends how hip and cosmopolitan I am.
So if the economy is so great in Spain, why is it the "S" in "PIIGS"?
ReplyDelete"Immigration hasn't failed in Spain, it just hasn't been tried enough!"
ReplyDeleteRight! And the only thing more pleasant than beating your own head against a wall is beating some other poor sucker's head against a wall. Crack their skulls breaking through that wall of prejudice and let the light shine into the brains of the bewildered masses.
A lot of South Americans immigrated to Spain in the last two decades.
ReplyDeleteStroll through Tetu??n, a vibrant multiethnic neighborhood in north central Madrid, and you'll find an Ecuadoran bakery, a Moroccan furniture shop, and an everything-for-1-euro store called Los Chinos because its owners are Chinese.
ReplyDeleteIn the eyes of the open borders enthusiasts, this sort of silly little anecdote is considered to be a Very Good Reason For Open Borders.
Well, when you're neck deep in a giant real estate bubble/scam, then you can "afford" an immigrant or two. What the hell, it's just borrowed money. Though even in boom times it's ill advised, culturally, because when the bubble bursts they never do go back home. They just get fat on the dole and ruin your culture.
ReplyDeleteFunny though, even with 27% unemployment you don't hear much talk about closing the doors, much less sending anyone back.
The Western death knell is sounding louder by the day.
I have a Guatemalan friend whose rich parents had retired to a beautiful sea-side villa in Spain. But a few years ago, they moved back. They decided that Spain's Moslems were scarier than Guatemala's Leftists.
ReplyDeleteThe New Yorker had a good article on the Spanish real estate meltdown. Requires subscription to access:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/02/25/130225fa_fact_paumgarten
A couple of choice graphs for the benighted:
"Six hundred new houses in the village of Pioz, outside Madrid, are empty, and the government estimates that it will take more than seven thousand years for Pioz to get out of debt. There are dozens and dozens of towns like Pioz." (that's not a typo: seven THOUSAND years)
"The damage to Spain's coastal landscape is severe and irreparable. Nearly a third of the Mediterranean waterfront is now concrete. In twenty years, Spain acquired an urbane opulence that turns out to have been built almost entirely on debt that cannot be repaid."
Back in 2001, when I visited Madrid, there was an Arab section of town a bit south of the palace that had streets so narrow you could practically stretch your arms across them and where most of the shops simply opened their entire fronts to the street. It was not dirty or dangerous, in fact it was kind of friendly and charming, but it definitely was not a modern European street.
ReplyDeleteSpanish unemployment is due to suboptimal interest rates imposed by the Euro.
ReplyDeleteIf immigration were to blame we would have expected high unemployment before the crisis.
"The government attributes more than half this stellar performance to immigration."
ReplyDeleteSure they did. It must have been easier than attributing growth to a property bubble and artificially low Eurozone interest rates.
And what is this nonsense about "weaving vitality"? Would it really suck so bad if the Spanish had Spanish-owned bakeries, furniture stores, and one-euro shops? It's not like anyone is stopping them from selling Moroccan furniture or baking Ecuadoran bread.
Anyway, here's a prediction: Bloomberg BusinessWeek will not apologize for celebrating a policy that depends upon the music never stopping. Even worse, nobody will ask them to.
Madrid native here. Thank god, able to afford not to live in Tetuan or any of the newly "wonderfully multiculturalized" neighbourhoods in this city.
ReplyDeleteBut what was in my mind about those places in the proccess of "increasing vibrancy", everytime I had to go to one of them?
"Everyday a step closer to the slums of Kolkata"
But who knows... "the economy was doing great with immigrants".
Exactly like in the US, no rise in salaries for the middle class in the "years of plenty", and
unprecedented levels of unemployment and falling wages now.
One benefit of their open door policy was a lot more tourism. Because even people from the developing world could get visas on arrival, they got a lot of tourists.
ReplyDeleteFor instance lots of Chinese planning a holiday in the EU didn't want to go through a visa application process so they went to Spain instead of elsewhere.
Mass unemployment is good for business owners, not for economy. In capitalist society, politics serve the capital and business owners.
ReplyDeleteYup.
ReplyDeleteAnd as we continually hear, the answer to the travails of the EU is "more Europe".
Incidentall, the Spanish economy is a bombed-out basket-case to end all bombed-out basket-cases.
Usually, you only hear of 27% unemployment rates and a collapsed economy after a nation ahs been defeated in an all-out total war that bled every cent from the economy, vis-a-vis post 1918 Germany. When was Spain's recent all-out total war?
Back in the day, ie before the crash, the immigrationists, the usual suspects, the WSJ, The Economist etc were singing the praises of Spain as a model of excellence that everyone should emulate and waxed lyrical that the permissive Spanish attitude to immigration was the force behind the 'miracle'. The wet-behind-the-ears Spanish political class even went as far to say something utterly stupid like "40% (or whtever it was) of growth was a direct consequence of free immigration".
Now I wonder what percentage point of crash do they attribute to immigration?
On yet another point, I've noticed that immigrationists in Europe have stpooed using 'economic growth' or 'jobs that locals won't do' as rationalizations for mass immigration - the financial bust-up put pay to that - now the excuse you hearsqueaked all over is that 'immigrants are need to fund pensions'. As an intelligent 7 year old,(New York kindergartened, no doubt), could tell you, this is manifestly absurd - immigrants, of course age too and will require state funded pensions in the future.
"Rising GDP"
ReplyDeleteJudas betraying Christ increased the Roman Empire's GDP by 30 pieces of silver.
That's not an original observation on my part.
These narratives always reduce everything down to commerce and whether money can be made; people are just so many interchangeable economic units. This is their mentality. It's never considered that people may actually want to live in an actual country with their own culture and way of life. Selling off the heritage that's been built up over the past thousand years or so, never to return, is what it is. Once it's gone it's gone.
ReplyDeleteNot quite. There is one country that they do worry about keeping its identity and culture. I imagine you know the answer.
On yet another point, I've noticed that immigrationists in Europe have stpooed using 'economic growth' or 'jobs that locals won't do' as rationalizations for mass immigration - the financial bust-up put pay to that - now the excuse you hearsqueaked all over is that 'immigrants are need to fund pensions'. As an intelligent 7 year old,(New York kindergartened, no doubt), could tell you, this is manifestly absurd - immigrants, of course age too and will require state funded pensions in the future.
ReplyDeleteIn America they have been trying to sell us that bill of goods too, that immigrants are needed to pay for pensions. But the problem is not that the immigrants will age. The problem is they are net tax consumers all their lives. If you could limit immigration to just those who take no welfare and pay taxes, they might have a point. But when you take people who collect welfare from childhood until death, then it makes no sense whatsoever.
Incidentall, the Spanish economy is a bombed-out basket-case to end all bombed-out basket-cases.
ReplyDeleteUsually, you only hear of 27% unemployment rates and a collapsed economy after a nation ahs been defeated in an all-out total war that bled every cent from the economy, vis-a-vis post 1918 Germany. When was Spain's recent all-out total war?
Uh oh. Does that mean the next Hitler will come from Spain?
In the second half of Biutiful, there is a thoughtful 5 second shot of Sagrada Familia in the distance--utterly beautiful--a testament to the brevity of life, the struggle, and the unfinished business. Toward the end, the immigrant african nanny divides up the stolen money, but not to leave half to the surviving children of the cancer-stricken Bardem. Rather, it is to avoid a total loss if one of her bags is stolen on her journey back to africa.
ReplyDeleteHad a quick gander at the Cowen site. His main beef these days seems to be that the west is condemned to a future of low or slow growth. That's funny as the economists assured us that the way to productivity growth was 'free trade' with the far east which would ensure rapid growth and rising incomes.
ReplyDelete27% unemployment is a terrible thing, but if diversity suffered instead -- that would be even worse.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure Business Week will be issuing a correction shortly.
ReplyDeleteSpain was one of the most homogeneous nations in Europe?
ReplyDeleteHaha, Spain itself has never been 'homogeneous'. Just ask Basques, Barcelonians, and bunch of others.
Similarly, the northern, middle, and southern Italian divide never made Italy homogeneous in the way it's meant in Sweden.
If more diversity is great, Latin American nations would all be richer than Spain.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, judging from what I hear on the streets, most young Spaniards are now emigrating to Austria and Germany. I wonder what happened to the Romanians and Moroccans? I suspect they've stayed behind in Spain.
ReplyDeleteSpain must be getting all the good looking immigrants from Latin America. Meanwhile, the USA is collecting all of Mexico's muffin top Mestizas:
ReplyDeletehttp://mexicanmuffintops.blogspot.com/
Why not do it like in rich Arab countries? Make them come and work but NO naturalization. Make the dough and go back! I mean Filippina maids in Saudi Arabi don't expect to become Saudi citizens. German engineers in Bahrain don't expect to be Bahraini citizens. South Korean construction managers don't expect to be Libyans. American consultants in Qatar don't expect to be Qatarese. French oil explorers don't expect to be Iraqi citizens.
ReplyDelete"Moroccan furniture shop,"
ReplyDeleteCan't beat that. Best argument I have ever heard for mass third world nation breaking immigration.
"Ecuadorian bakery".
It doesn't get any better then that! I'm now sold on racial displacement of westerners.
"An everything for 1 Euro store run by Chinese".
How did the west survive without this?
Sold, sold, sold on mass immigration!
In any subject except immigration such nonsense wouldn't dare even be printed.
Every Western country, poor or rich, has displacement-level immigration, yet the nationalist reaction that has been predicted for decades has NOT happened. Not even in supposedly anti-immigrant Denmark, which is now admitting more immigrants than ever, as is Ireland (which is broke).
ReplyDeleteThe test results are in, it's terminal.
This from Mike Shedlock today: Spain's Retail Sales Fall 4.2%, 38 Consecutive Negative Months
ReplyDeleteAccording to a catalonian economist that hast just published a book on Spain´s high unemployment ("La sortida del laberint", by Miquel Puig - it´s only available in catalonian, not in spanish), it is true that immigration has been deleterious for Spain.
ReplyDeleteHis argumentation, and it seems to be spot-on to me, is that Spain imported too many immigrants to work in crappy, low added-value sectors because that´s the kind of jobs the country had to offer. Of course, the jobs could have been taken by natives... by they wouldn´t, since they were lied into believing that they would have well-paid jobs in the IT and high tech sectors. So youths went to university to study for jobs that simply were not available... then came the crisis, the immigrants lost their crappy jobs and the young got no jobs at all. Hence the high unemployment.
By the way, the number of immigrants received in around ten years (1999-2008) is 7 million. Many of those (South Americans, filipinos) immediately disappear from the statistics in just two years because our civil code, written in 1889 (sic), gives instant citizenship to denizens of former spanish colonies. Of course, the number of politicians, journalists, intellectuals or whatever noticing this absurdity and proposing to change it amounts to exactly 0.0000. I am not holding my breath.
@anonymous 9/30/13, 7:15 AM
ReplyDelete"What I have been told by UK people resident in Spain, the economy is on the brink and social norms are breaking down.
"Media images and reality aren't drifting apart, they are powering apart.
"GC"
Is that really you, Godless?
"Iceland (population less than 1% of Spain) had the same problem but seems to have filled the empty living spaces will Icelanders, evidently leading to a baby boom."
ReplyDeleteGod, can you imagine the horror if the United States suffered a baby boom among young, white couples?
At the height of the housing crisis, they were doing everything to avoid this, inlcuding suggestions of bulldozing "surplus" housing.
"And why does anyone need foreigners to eat foreign food? I think they got pizza in Japan and sushi in Mexico."
And in America we have foreign food from every corner of the globe, all of it whipped up by Mexicans.
Mass immigration is, at best, the economic equivalent of a performance enhancing drug, with all of the health consequences and then some.
ReplyDeleteI remember realizing this back during the Bush Wonder Years, before the economic meltdown, before we suffered through the greatest financial catastrophe in 80 years.
"Madrid native here. Thank god, able to afford not to live in Tetuan or any of the newly "wonderfully multiculturalized" neighbourhoods in this city."
ReplyDeleteHala. How the hell did you guys let Özil get away?
There must either be an extremely generous social safety net in Spain or a black market economy that isn't captured by official stats, because Spain doesn't seem like a country with 27% unemployment.
ReplyDelete"And for young adults unemployment is much higher, even science-fictionally high: from roughly 20% in 2006 (the prelapsarian age!) it shot up to 56%..."
ReplyDeleteI'm curious: how do they spend their time? Do they work somewhere off the books? Do they watch TV, hang out on Facebook and play video games? Something else?
Dave Pinsen said: "... Spain doesn't seem like a country with 27% unemployment."
ReplyDeleteI have visited Spain (Madrid, Sevilla, Granada, Barcelona, etc) this year (July-August) and I had the same impression. At least in the touristy areas. Nothing compared to your typical black-&-white news feeds from the US Great Depression.
Also, very few non-Europeans in restaurants, hotels, stores, museums, etc. (both as clients and as servers).
OTOH, talking to a cab driver in Barcelona, he was telling me that only 10% of taxi drivers in the city are Catalunians.
30% unemployment feels different in Spain than it would in the US. When I was there, after the crash, the cafes were full, the people well dressed, young people were going out and partying at night. This did not feel like Depression. I could not understand it.
ReplyDeleteSo the pro-immigration article on Spain was from 2007.
ReplyDeleteToday we find this article on Spain, "Spain's public debt to approach 100 percent of GDP end-2014".
I guess the immigrants aren't contributing to pensions and the overall tax base.
According to a catalonian economist that hast just published a book on Spain´s high unemployment ("La sortida del laberint", by Miquel Puig - it´s only available in catalonian, not in spanish), it is true that immigration has been deleterious for Spain.
ReplyDeleteHis argumentation, and it seems to be spot-on to me, is that Spain imported too many immigrants to work in crappy, low added-value sectors because that´s the kind of jobs the country had to offer. Of course, the jobs could have been taken by natives... by they wouldn´t, since they were lied into believing that they would have well-paid jobs in the IT and high tech sectors. So youths went to university to study for jobs that simply were not available... then came the crisis, the immigrants lost their crappy jobs and the young got no jobs at all. Hence the high unemployment.
By the way, the number of immigrants received in around ten years (1999-2008) is 7 million. Many of those (South Americans, filipinos) immediately disappear from the statistics in just two years because our civil code, written in 1889 (sic), gives instant citizenship to denizens of former spanish colonies. Of course, the number of politicians, journalists, intellectuals or whatever noticing this absurdity and proposing to change it amounts to exactly 0.0000. I am not holding my breath.
Well, that's the old lie only immigrants should do construction work. Maybe less foreigners and less building but the building should have been done by the natives. An example in the US, construction averages 11 per hr among Hispanic immigrants legal or not and 16 per hr among the native born in Texas.
"Haha Spain itself has never been homogeneous. Just ask the Basques, Barcelonians etc, and a bunch of others. Likewise Italy has a north, south and middle divide that never made the country homogenous in the way its meant in Sweden."
ReplyDeleteYour confusing ETHNIC diversity with RACIAL diversity. That is quite a difference indeed. Also all the participants in question were adherents to the same religion (Christianity) and were all long term inhabitants of the same regions.
As a comparison consider Britain at any time before the 1950's. The island was basically composed of English, Welsh and Scottish peoples with some indeterminate populations of Irish. These were ETHNIC differences, but not RACIAL ones. No one would have thought of Britain as a "diverse" country in 1950, certainly not in anything like the sense the word is used today.
Too bad public discussion doesn't seem to include admitting you were wrong. (Anymore, if it ever did. Aside from the occasional intellectual bet...)
ReplyDelete27%. Of course, that number doesn't mean anything if you aren't one of those animals who actually works for a live.
The 1% does well indeed with both parties. Our overlords indeed.
Isn't it the quality of the immigrant? Do you think if a good number of these immigrants were Korean, Chinese, or Vietnamese you wouldn't see positive upward numbers?
ReplyDeleteA lot of Spanish young people live at home with their parents. As long as one or both of the parents keeps a job, they wouldn't necessarily be living on skid row or in tent cities.
ReplyDeleteJudge (in Spain) orders 25-year-old man to leave home and find job
ReplyDeleteExactly like in the US, no rise in salaries for the middle class in the "years of plenty", and
unprecedented levels of unemployment and falling wages now.
Who needs a raise when you've go vibrancy?!s
People are not fungible.
ReplyDeleteContrary to the Universal Church of Progressive Equality, all men are not created equal.
Import the Third World, become the Third World. The Oligarchical Collectivists know this. It's time the common citizen did too.
I was in Madrid, Barcelona, Toledo and Cordoba late last year. On the surface it hardly seemed like the country was wrecked. But you would see well-dressed people fishing shopping vouchers out of garbage cans.
ReplyDeleteA major source of economic activity in Madrid seemed to be selling lottery tickets, for which the lines were immensely long every night. Anecdotally I was told most people were struggling and even well-qualified lawyers were struggling to bank a thousand euros a month. A big problem apparently is that tax evasion is the norm.
Despite all that people were still swarming the streets and having a food time late at night even if they weren't spending anything. And if you got up early at 7 am or so there didn't seem to be many worker bees power-walking to work in the early morning.
Spain´s bars used to be packed throughout the week. The Great Depression II has hit the retail and service sectors very badly, despite everything looking normal to casual travellers, I´m told.
ReplyDeleteCheap credit and an endless supply of cheap labour are a recipe for disaster. No matter how the Economist chooses to spin it.
The end result so far: public and private debt through the roof, an economy down the tubes, a generation in exile, an ageing population, and a permanent, hostile and unemployable army of foreigners numbering in the millions.
The sole winners are: banks
(mostly Spanish) and foreign investors, poised to buy real state and businesses at retail price. And politicians who oversee and manage the disaster, as always. Same story as in Greece, only with a greater GDP. Soon to happen in the USA too, with the added effect of the dollar implosion.
Several people have commented on what a genteel recession Europe is going through. With numbers that bad, they should be taking real hits to their living standards.
ReplyDeleteI think, I don't know, that debt and money-printing are keeping the illusion up. That only buys you some time, so they're also trying to expand their economies via immigration. But a society of retired engineers and tradesmen is not going to make it on the incomes of Third World shopkeepers and taxi drivers. Or even Third World engineers and tradesmen, since all they're going to do is drive down wages and drive up demand for essentials.
The books do not balance, and eventually the living standards will reflect this.
You know Spain had an amnesty for around 700,000 illegal immigrants in 2005?
ReplyDeleteI imagine half of the newly created Spaniards immediately headed North.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/may/09/spain.gilestremlett
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/4579127.stm
Iceland (population less than 1% of Spain) had the same problem but seems to have filled the empty living spaces will Icelanders, evidently leading to a baby boom.
ReplyDeleteThe problem wasn't as bad in Iceland because no banker is stupid enough to think that lots of people would want to retire to Iceland, not even the ones who thought that semi-legal construction laborers could make the mortgage on $750k houses.
Make no mistake, Spain was not a developed high tech economy even before the mass immigration took place. Spanish economy was, and still is, heavily depended on agriculture and inbound tourism from UK, Germany, Sweden, etc., thanks to the best weather in Western Europe it enjoys.
ReplyDeleteIf you holiday in Spain often, you even could feel it that it seems to be country by and large producing waiters and cooks for hotel/restaurant/bar industry. This probably reflects Spanish average IQ of about 95 or even lower.
Spain’s crucial mistake in recent years, however, is to have taken too many unskilled immigrants from South America and Morocco, most of them being worse the domestic average. This is the time bomb for Spanish economy going forward.
One thing few people even takes notice is the characteristics of Spain’s Chinese immigrants. Most of them are the 1srt generation working for Chinese restaurants. Now here is the catch:
They are an unusual group of people. >90% of them are Wu Chinese9 from the same two villages/towns of one of China’s historical IQ Mecca - Zhejiang Province – the one with average IQ likely = 110 even without counting the full Flynn effects. Even though they were literally landless farmers in their home villages with very low average education level, watch out for their second generation 10 or 15 years from now. They could become a “gold mine” for Spanish high tech industry if the Spaniards have any clue whom they are dealing with and how to take advantage of them, considering the fact that the raw average IQ of these Zhejiang people could well be arguablely the highest of ANY Chinese immigrant groups anywhere in the world, leaving both earlier Chinese immigrants to the US and the UK (Cantonese mainly) to dust in comparison.
[* e.g. the following have Wu Chinese ancestry: Jerry Yang, Terence Tao, An Wang, Tsung-Dao Lee(Nobel Prize Physics), Chien-Shiung Wu(“Chinese Marie Curie”, female scientist of mahantten Project), Steve Hsu, Jeremy Lin, etc]
They are an unusual group of people. >90% of them are Wu Chinese9 from the same two villages/towns of one of China’s historical IQ Mecca - Zhejiang Province – the one with average IQ likely = 110 even without counting the full Flynn effects. Even though they were literally landless farmers in their home villages with very low average education level, watch out for their second generation 10 or 15 years from now. They could become a “gold mine” for Spanish high tech industry if the Spaniards have any clue whom they are dealing with and how to take advantage of them, considering the fact that the raw average IQ of these Zhejiang people could well be arguablely the highest of ANY Chinese immigrant groups anywhere in the world, leaving both earlier Chinese immigrants to the US and the UK (Cantonese mainly) to dust in comparison.
ReplyDeleteFu Manchu is dat you.
"A Moroccan furniture shop".
ReplyDeleteI love how they say that. As if it is such a big deal, such a huge contribution to Spain.
Even if it were, could not native Spaniards just set up such a store themselves, and just import the furniture from Morocco, rather then importing Moroccans into Spain instead?
`Fu Manchu is dat you.`
ReplyDeleteNahh...
You must be José The Waiter then?
Same story as in Greece, only with a greater GDP. Soon to happen in the USA too, with the added effect of the dollar implosion.
ReplyDeleteThe air was out of the real estate bubble in this country by the spring of 2009. Thus far, banks have successfully recognized losses without manifest insolvency and loan delinquency rates have been declining for 3 years and change (and are now under par for non-real estate loans). See the statistics provided by the Federal Reserve.
"French oil explorers don't expect to be Iraqi citizens"
ReplyDeleteSame applies to those charming offshore tax havens Jersey and Guernsey. You go out there to work in "financial services" aged 23, when you retire at 60 it's goodbye, unless you've made a pile and can buy your way in. That or marry a local.
"5 years later: Spanish economy in total collapse." - Wonder if there was any kind of bubble back in 2007 that was masking the massive negative changes being wrought to Spain.
ReplyDelete