Thanks to the economic slump, all over Europe immigrant workers are packing up and heading. There are no jobs for these people, and so after a number of salad years they are heading back to their countries of origin.
For the past number of years, Spain, Britain, and Ireland had flourishing economies and liberal immigrant policies. But now with the economy faltering in the EU, immigrant workers can no longer move freely around Europe in search of jobs. As the article in the New York Times reports, the nations themselves may have porous borders but national identities are still pretty much fixed.
What is particularly interesting are the vendors in the different countries who have established themselves to service the immigrants fromthe different countries. There are everything from ethnic restaurants to video rentals that will suffer from the loss of clientle. So not only does the economic downturn hurt the entire job market, but also affects the businesses that were established to support this contingent of workers. It will be interesting to see what happens to these businesses; to see if the nationals acclimated to the different ethnic foods and services that grew up around the immigrant workers. Meanwhile, thousand will be returning hom without the near future hope of a paycheck.
