TRYING TO BE AMERICAN:

How Spain Thrives on Immigration: The open-border policy under Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero is driving a Spanish economic and social revival. (Carol Matlack, 5/10/07, Der Spiegel)

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 percent 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 match the US rate of 12.9 percent.

And it doesn't seem to have hurt much. Spain is Europe's best-performing major economy, with growth averaging 3.1 percent 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 percent in the 1990s to 8.6 percent, within shooting distance of the 7.2 percent euro zone average. The government attributes more than half this stellar performance to immigration. "We are very thankful for all these people who have come here to work with us," says Javier Vallés, economic policy chief for Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero.

Their problem is that there is nothing to assimilate them to.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 10, 2007 11:42 AM