Spain - an EU country to watch

Spain is often cited as a country with its economy permanently over-heated - the government can't raise interest rates to cool down demand because of that little beast the Euro. The country's changing in other ways too. We've probably all seen the huge amount of property development going on in parts of Spain. And today The Guardian highlights another change - immigration.

Spain was a country with net emigration until the late 1980s. Now, after 10 years of economic growth, it has 3.7 million immigrants of its own - or 8.7% of the population.

Some of them are British. "Some 47,000 Britons ... signed on as new residents at Spanish town halls last year. That brought the registered British population in Spain to 274,000....
But experts estimate that up to three times as many Britons, about 750,000 people, spend a significant part of the year living in Spain."

In 2005 the official population figure was 44.1m.

Spain has created more than half of all the new jobs in the European Union over the past five years, The Guardian reports.

At least 700,000 immigrants from Latin America, eastern Europe and north Africa live in Spain without proper residency or work permits, government officials have said. The figure is down by 650,000 since last year, when the Socialist government decreed an immigration amnesty.

It was the sixth immigration amnesty in Spain in 16 years, and was predicted to increase social security contributions by up to £1bn a year.

Opposition politicians said there may be a million more foreigners living illegally in the country.

The Guardian points out that sub-Saharan Africans barely show on the official statistics, but "west African immigrants are arriving by their hundreds on rickety boats bound for the Canary Islands". And "young immigrant families have finally turned around a birth rate that had become one of the world's lowest".

Well, we must hope for Spain's sake that things turn out well. But you do wonder if the Spanish government can do more than cling on to a runaway train for dear life. And if Spain hits the buffers, that will spell trouble for the EU.