[BRIEF NOTE] On Spain's new, exciting immigration policy

Back in May 2007, Carol Matlick in Business Week (How Spain Thrives on Immigration) wrote about what was seen as the largely positive effect of mass immigration--already notable in the first part of this decade, becoming a mass phenomenon more recently--for the Spanish economy.

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 match 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. "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.

[. . .]

Spain has had special reasons to welcome outsiders. As recently as the mid-1990s it was an economic backwater with an aging population and per-capita income only 80% of the EU average, vs. 96% now. But lower interest rates and a healthy dose of aid from Brussels sparked a demand for labor.

To fill jobs, Spain looked abroad. Immigration rose from 57,000 in 1998 to more than 600,000 for each of the past two years. The biggest influx, about 800,000 since the mid-1990s, came from Ecuador, followed by Morocco and Romania. Spain, unlike France and Germany, places no restrictions on immigration from the EU's new members in the old Soviet Bloc.

Spain's recent strong economic growth has come to an end, not least because of the ongoing collapse of the building industry and the related troubles in Spain's financial sector. Just like as in other immigrant-receiving countries facing hard times, as reported in The Globe and Mail--Spain's welcoming attitude towards immigrants is changing.

In the continent's younger economies, notably Spain and Ireland, the worldwide financial downturn has predominantly been a crisis of the building industry. In Spain, a quarter of all working-age adults last year were employed in the booming construction sector.

The boom quickly ended: This summer, home sales in Spain were down 30 per cent over last year and new mortgages down almost 40 per cent -- and that was before credit markets collapsed.

According to analysts, construction and real-estate loans make up almost one-fifth of the lending portfolios of Spain's commercial banks. While Spanish banks are generally considered more secure than other European institutions, Spain's Socialist Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, was forced to issue a €50-billion bailout package for the major banks on Monday, as well as raising state deposit insurance to €100,000.

The downturn has left more than 2.6 million people out of work in this country of 45 million, with unemployment at 11.3 per cent, the highest in the 27 European Union countries.

[. . .]

This week, Mr. Zapatero announced that his government's 2009 budget will increase unemployment benefit payments by more than 24 per cent, or €3.6-billion. The government will pay more than €29-billion in benefits and retraining-assistance payments.

And more than half of those workers were immigrants, hired from Romania, Morocco and especially from Latin America during the past 10 years by construction firms. Mr. Zapatero has spent the past four years making these immigrants, who now comprise one-tenth of Spain's population, feel at home.

This month, he began to offer another option: He would pay them a year's benefits, in cash, if they went back home for at least three years. Forty per cent would be payable in advance, the rest upon arrival. When they returned to Spain, they would get their old immigration status back.

"We definitely have too many workers here, and we wanted to give immigrants another set of options," Mr. Zapatero's Immigration Minister, Concha Gutierrez, said in an interview at Madrid's parliament yesterday.

"We're not telling them to leave. ... They can use their benefits to set up a new business and make a new start in their original country."

It goes without saying that the mass return of immigrants isn't likely to happen. As immigrants interviewed in the article point out, if things are bad in Spain they're going to be worse in their homelands. Besides, many of these immigrants have put down roots in their adopted country. Why should they leave?

[LINK] "The Real Great Depression"

A Fistful of Euros' Douglas Muir pointsin the direction of an interesting if disturbing article as the Chronicle of Higher Education, Scott Reynolds Nelson's "The Real Great Depression". Nelson suggests that the current economic crisis bears less resemblance to the Great Depression and more to the late 19th century's Long Depression
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The problems had emerged around 1870, starting in Europe. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, formed in 1867, in the states unified by Prussia into the German empire, and in France, the emperors supported a flowering of new lending institutions that issued mortgages for municipal and residential construction, especially in the capitals of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. Mortgages were easier to obtain than before, and a building boom commenced. Land values seemed to climb and climb; borrowers ravenously assumed more and more credit, using unbuilt or half-built houses as collateral. The most marvelous spots for sightseers in the three cities today are the magisterial buildings erected in the so-called founder period.

But the economic fundamentals were shaky. Wheat exporters from Russia and Central Europe faced a new international competitor who drastically undersold them. The 19th-century version of containers manufactured in China and bound for Wal-Mart consisted of produce from farmers in the American Midwest. They used grain elevators, conveyer belts, and massive steam ships to export trainloads of wheat to abroad. Britain, the biggest importer of wheat, shifted to the cheap stuff quite suddenly around 1871. By 1872 kerosene and manufactured food were rocketing out of America's heartland, undermining rapeseed, flour, and beef prices. The crash came in Central Europe in May 1873, as it became clear that the region's assumptions about continual economic growth were too optimistic. Europeans faced what they came to call the American Commercial Invasion. A new industrial superpower had arrived, one whose low costs threatened European trade and a European way of life.

As continental banks tumbled, British banks held back their capital, unsure of which institutions were most involved in the mortgage crisis. The cost to borrow money from another bank--the interbank lending rate--reached impossibly high rates. This banking crisis hit the United States in the fall of 1873. Railroad companies tumbled first. They had crafted complex financial instruments that promised a fixed return, though few understood the underlying object that was guaranteed to investors in case of default. (Answer: nothing). The bonds had sold well at first, but they had tumbled after 1871 as investors began to doubt their value, prices weakened, and many railroads took on short-term bank loans to continue laying track. Then, as short-term lending rates skyrocketed across the Atlantic in 1873, the railroads were in trouble. When the railroad financier Jay Cooke proved unable to pay off his debts, the stock market crashed in September, closing hundreds of banks over the next three years. The panic continued for more than four years in the United States and for nearly six years in Europe.

[. . .]

As the panic deepened, ordinary Americans suffered terribly. A cigar maker named Samuel Gompers who was young in 1873 later recalled that with the panic, "economic organization crumbled with some primeval upheaval." Between 1873 and 1877, as many smaller factories and workshops shuttered their doors, tens of thousands of workers — many former Civil War soldiers — became transients. The terms "tramp" and "bum," both indirect references to former soldiers, became commonplace American terms. Relief rolls exploded in major cities, with 25-percent unemployment (100,000 workers) in New York City alone. Unemployed workers demonstrated in Boston, Chicago, and New York in the winter of 1873-74 demanding public work. In New York's Tompkins Square in 1874, police entered the crowd with clubs and beat up thousands of men and women. The most violent strikes in American history followed the panic, including by the secret labor group known as the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania's coal fields in 1875, when masked workmen exchanged gunfire with the "Coal and Iron Police," a private force commissioned by the state. A nationwide railroad strike followed in 1877, in which mobs destroyed railway hubs in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Cumberland, Md.

In Central and Eastern Europe, times were even harder. Many political analysts blamed the crisis on a combination of foreign banks and Jews. Nationalistic political leaders (or agents of the Russian czar) embraced a new, sophisticated brand of anti-Semitism that proved appealing to thousands who had lost their livelihoods in the panic. Anti-Jewish pogroms followed in the 1880s, particularly in Russia and Ukraine. Heartland communities large and small had found a scapegoat: aliens in their own midst.

[BRIEF NOTE] On Québec French

It's well-known that disputes over the relative statuses of the English and French languages in Québec are commonplace. What isn'tknown nearly as well is the conflict between Québec's local dialect of French and the European French that's the international standard for the language. As pointed out here, there are significant lexical and other differences between the two dialects. These differences becamie major issues during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, as people challenging cultural conventions attacked the belief that Standard French was the only acceptable version of the language and that French as it was spoken was not different but flawed. One of these activists went so far as to write a Dictionnaire de la langue québécoise, with a more moderate sort of language normalization actually taken place, with different versions of Québec French becoming the normal language of spoken discourse, not so much a written one.. As for the accent, well, Francophones from France are said to often find it funny and perhaps incomprehensible. The latest we Anglophones have heard of this debate, as described in Les Perreaux's article in The Globe and Mail ("'Deplorable' Québécois accent has royal roots, linguist asserts") is linguist Jean-Denis Gendron's contentious argument that Québec French is in fact the French of the 17th and 18th centuries.

"The Québécois accent is one from the noblesse of the time, it is a relaxed, natural accent," Jean-Denis Gendron, a retired professor from Laval University, argues in the October edition of Quebec Sciences. "It's only much later that our accent came to be viewed as an abomination."

The Quebec accent's voyage from the king's court to linguistic "abomination" can be traced through historical events and the accounts of visitors to the colonies, Mr. Gendron argues.

Early settlers in New France came from western France and were highly influenced by the Parisien aristocracy. Later, in the colonial era, clergy, military officers and local governors carried on with that influence.

Mr. Gendron's research shows that as late as 1757, the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville wrote that "the Canadian accent is as pure as that of the Parisians." Around the same time, a French clergyman said Canadian French was closer to the language spoken in Paris than the French spoken in Bordeaux or Marseilles.

The language link changed dramatically over the next 50 years.

The English victory on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 cut off links with France even as French academics worked on a massive project to standardize grammar and pronunciation.

"They got rid of all the pronunciations they didn't judge perfect for high society, and the cleanup continued through the 18th century," said Claude Poirier, an expert in French-language history at Laval University.

The French revolution of the 1790s eliminated the French aristocracy who still shared Canadian speech patterns, Mr. Gendron said.

The French re-established links with their French-Canadian cousins in the 1800s and found a language they barely understood. In 1810, the Paris-trained Englishman John Lambert was among the first to note the "deplorable" French-Canadian accent, but he was soon backed by French explorers Théodore Pavie and Alexis de Tocqueville.

"These travellers spoke with the new French accent and they found our accent very bizarre," Mr. Gendron said.

Other commentators point out later in the article that this is only a partial explanation--few of the migrants who settled French Canada came from the Paris basin or had connections with the aristocracy, while the local dialects has words from the regions of northern and western France that provided the most settlers as well as English. It also seems obvious to me that it's an attempt to inverse the pecking order of French dialects. That said, it's certainly a provocative take on the subject of French diaelcts: The periphery, it seems, talks back.