● Nello scorso decennio in Spagna la popolazione nata all’estero è aumentata di oltre il 500%, a poco più di 5,7 mn., oltre il 12% della popolazione.
● L’America Latina è la maggiore fonte di immigrazione in Spagna, Romania e Marocco i due maggiori paesi singoli, seguiti da Ecuador.
● L’alta disoccupazione e le misure anti-immigrati innescate dalla crisi hanno fermato il movimento di immigrazione in Spagna, uno dei maggiori boom di immigrazione del mondo sviluppato moderno.
o È iniziato il ritorno degli immigrati nei maggiori paesi fonti di immigrazione, come l’Ecuador.
● In Ecuador, le rimesse dei lavoratori immigrati in Spagna sono diminuite del 20%, e il governo ha organizzato programmi per aiutare quelli che ritornano a trovare lavoro.
o Nel 2009, gli ecuadoregni che abitano in Spagna sono diminuiti di 26 357, a 395 069.
o In totale la popolazione nata all’estero è aumentata in Spagna dell’1% nel 2009, contro il +17% del 2007.
o Nel 2009 da USA e Spagna sono rientrati in Ecuador 1,5-3 mn. di immigrati, su un totale di 14 mn. di lavoratori emigrati.
o Nonostante le difficoltà diversi immigrati preferiscono rimanere in Spagna dove hanno garantito cure sanitarie ed educazione, diversamente da diversi paesi latino-americani.
o Il presidente ecuadoregno Correa ha parlato di ingratitudine storica: negli anni 1930 l’America Latina ha aperto le proprie porte ai rifugiati spagnoli che fuggivano la dittatura di Franco.
● Durante il decennio di forte sviluppo economico 1997-2007, la Spagna ha attuato una delle più accomodanti politiche migratorie, avendo bisogno di operai per l’edilizia e i servizi;
o grazie ad amnistie per immigrati illegali, facilitazione delle procedure per riunificazione familiare, reclutamento all’estero, gli immigrati occupavano circa il 40% dei 6 milioni di posti di lavoro creati nel decennio in Spagna (dati OCSE).
● politica invertita con la crisi dell’economia fortemente dipendente dall’edilizia: il governo spagnolo ha subito bloccato i programmi di reclutamento estero, limitato le riunificazioni familiari e inasprito le pene per gli imprenditori che utilizzano immigranti illegali; introdotto un “Programma di Ritorno Volontario”, con il pagamento di sussidi di disoccupazione accumulati come incentivo al ritorno a casa.
Sugli immigrati si è scaricato il maggiore peso dell’aumento della disoccupazione, 30%, contro il 12% del 2007, e il 20% della media spagnola.
MADRID—Alexandra Gorosabel and her family came to Spain during the past decade’s economic boom determined to escape the poverty of their home country of Ecuador. But the collapsing Spanish economy and tighter immigration restrictions have dashed their dreams.
Ms. Gorosabel’s husband lost his gardening job earlier this year and she could only find a few hours’ work as a housecleaner, laboring illegally. So in June, the 35-year-old Ms. Gorosabel decided to return to Ecuador with her two young children. "I’m wasting my youth here, for nothing," she said, adding that she expects her husband will soon follow her home.
– Spain’s sky-high unemployment and a backlash against foreign workers that was sparked by the downturn have put the brakes on what experts consider one of developed world’s biggest immigration booms in modern times. Overall, immigrant arrivals have dwindled to a trickle, and there has been an outflow of workers from some major feeder countries like Ecuador.
– On Wednesday, Moody’s Investors Service put Spain’s triple-A credit rating on review for a possible downgrade. The move follows Fitch Ratings’ downgrade of Spain from the coveted top rating. That one-notch cut added pressure to the euro and stocks. In April, Standard & Poor’s cut Spain to double-A.
– In Ecuador, remittances from workers in Spain have fallen by 20%, and the government has had to devise programs to help returnees find work and adapt psychologically to their abrupt homecoming. In a recent interview with the Spanish press, Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa said tougher European immigration policies represented a "monstrous inconsistency" and "historic ingratitude," pointing out that Latin America opened its doors to Spanish refugees after the rise of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco in the 1930s.
– 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.
– Ecuadoran fisherman Gustavo Luzuriaga had been in Spain seven years, but he returned home last year after he couldn’t find work on a boat. "Everything had gone sour there, and there was not much hope for the future," he said.
– 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.)
Laura Tedesco, an Argentine political scientist who is a visiting professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid, says there is a limit to how many migrants will abandon Spain despite the hardship there.
– "Many of these migrants are not coming from cities like Quito, but from the interior where there are no basic services at all," she says, adding that even if they find little work in Spain, many Latin American migrants will decide to stay there, for free health care and education.
– Even though returning home is the last recourse, Lorena Escudero, head of Ecuador’s National Secretariat for Migrants, notes that the number of returnees was up sharply last year from the U.S., as well as Spain. (Overall, an estimated 1.5 million to three million of Ecuador’s total population of about 14 million works abroad.)
– In the past couple of years, Ecuador has rolled out several programs to assist returnees, including offering psychological assistance for migrants who lost jobs or were deported, as well as allowing returnees to ship back their belongings without paying customs duties.
– Ecuador also launched the Cucayo Fund, a program of financial grants and mentoring aimed at helping returnees set up businesses. The government has helped finance 240 start-ups, including Mr. Luzuriaga’s new fishing boat, "The Pepe Soles."
Another grant recipient is Christian Lopez, who returned in mid-2008 after a decade in Spain working in construction and parcel delivery. He invested the grant money, along with the proceeds from the sale of an apartment in Spain he had unloaded near the peak of the real-estate boom, into the Off Side recreation center, featuring a restaurant and soccer field. He says weakness in Ecuador’s oil-based economy made the going tougher than expected at first. But with his mentor’s help, Mr. Lopez has fine-tuned his business plan, recently adding a soccer school he says looks like a good revenue generator.
Cucayo participants such as Claudia Landivar, who came back from Spain to start a cosmetics business, say the guidance from the mentor is as important as the grant money.
"I knew nothing of bookkeeping, until our mentor showed us," she says, adding that her business is going well. "I feel lucky I’m not in Spain today."
—Joan E. Solsman in New York contributed to this article.