MADRID: After losing her job as a maid several months ago, 26-year-old Magaly Baez is preparing to return to Paraguay with her husband, an unemployed waiter, and their nine-month-old baby. “The plan had been to stay in Spain, bring over our children and obtain residency papers,” she said as she left a government-run soup kitchen set up by the regional government of Madrid specifically for immigrants. Spanish visa rules deny renewal requests if immigrants become unemployed and fail to make social security payments. So without jobs the couple are no longer living legally in Spain, putting an end to their hopes of having their three other children to join them in the country.Just three years after moving to Spain, the couple has decided to accept the offer to have their return trip home paid for by the Spanish government. Spain's sharp economic downturn has put an end to the dream of a better life for tens of thousands of immigrants from Latin America like Baez who moved to the country over the past decade. The country has 5.7 million immigrants, just over one-quarter of them from former Spanish colonies in Latin America, out of a total population of 47 million, up from around half a million in 1996. Many were drawn to jobs in the construction sector, which collapsed when the bubble burst on Spain's credit-fueled property market at the end of 2008, causing the unemployment rate to soar, especially amongst immigrants. Spain's jobless rate stands at around 20 percent for the general population but it is ten percentage points higher amongst immigrants, according to official data. Of all the member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development with a foreign population of at least ten percent, Spain has the highest immigrant unemployment rate. Without steady jobs, many immigrants struggle to cover basic necessities. Baez said she earned some money babysitting or doing housecleaning but relied on charities like the soup kitchen to survive. “At the beginning I felt ashamed. But if it wasn't for this, who knows what we would eat,” she said as she held bags of food provided by the soup kitchen to feed herself, her husband and her baby. The soup kitchen has gone from feeding 300 people a day before the collapse of the property sector to 500 last year and over 600 currently. Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialist government launched a program at the end of 2008 to ease the “voluntary return” of jobless immigrants.
