Immigration Destroys Your Economy

Spain's new Plan of Voluntary Return, which goes into effect Monday, entitles legal immigrants who have lost their jobs to receive unemployment benefits as a lump sum payment - as long as they agree to leave the country. Participants must turn in their residence permits and work visas and promise not to return to Spain for three years. In exchange, they receive 40% of their total unemployment payouts before departing and the remaining 60% once they are home - an expected average of just over $40,000 in total.

The measure is one attempt to solve Spain's growing unemployment problem. With joblessness recently reaching a 15-year high of 11.3%, the country's 4 million documented immigrants are feeling the pinch acutely. Unemployment among them is up 67.1% on average over 2007. Between April and August of this year, the number of immigrants receiving unemployment jumped from 165,217 to 280,298.

Time

Simple economics: introduce cheap labor with fewer overhead costs, and prices go down, but so does the value of your currency. As a result, fewer jobs are retained except... those which are cheap immigrant labor.

We're seeing the same thing in the USA. Prices went down, so did the value of the dollar. I guess it always costs roughly the same to make the products we need, lol!