Do tight fitting pants lead to a narrow view of the economy?

I'm not sure what's happening in the rest of the world but the main headline on the frontpage of the ADN newspaper this morning was "40% of Spaniards can't find the right sized clothing". Well, although I'm not sure it merits frontpage news, I can certainly identify with them because I'm yet to find a pair of trousers in Spain that don't make me look like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. It doesn't seem to matter what size I choose, it's akin to wearing a straight jacket. Judging by Popular Party leader Mariano Rajoy's comments about immigrants last night on TV, I'm starting to wonder whether maybe his pants are constricting the blood flowing to his brain too.

In a TV interview Rajoy said that if he wins the election, Spain's estimated 1.1 million undocumented immigrants will not be given papers. Ok, so what's the alternative? Well there are two really. One is that they work here illegally and the government makes absolutely no revenue from their taxes. The other is that they are all sent home in mass deportations.

There are two fundamental problems that the PP are overlooking here. From a simple crude economic point of view, it's now pretty much understood that without immigrant workers to do menial jobs and especially support the booming construction industry, Spain's economy would not have experienced the spectacular boom that it has over the past 10 years. The last major study on the matter by Caixa Catalunya found that:

Spain's economy has grown at an average rate of 2.6 percent a year over the last decade, but without the contribution of immigrants, gross domestic product (GDP) would have fallen by 0.6 percent over the same period. Between 1995 and 2005, Spain experienced the highest growth in immigration in the whole of the European Union. In fact, 78.6 percent of its demographic growth was due to immigration.

The second problem is that there is simply no way you can stop desperate people from entering Spain. No matter how many you deport, they'll still get back in. Unless Rajoy has some masterplan to move Spain to another part of the World, it has to accept the fact that it is the closest European country to Africa and thus the main entry point for those fleeing economic ruin. I am sure that most of these people would rather not leave their homelands and family behind, make a life or death sea crossing, in the hope of scoring a job as a cleaner or builder in a foreign land. But such is the desperate situation they find themselves in, that it's a risk they're willing to take.

I'm trying to see things here from a cold economic point of view here. I don't agree that economic growth should be the be-all and end-all of a society. If you look at all the problems it causes, environmentally, socially and the mental well being of people in general, chasing the yankee dollar is actually insane. But that's the dogma that we all believe in during the current era and in the political arena, strengthening the economy is the only language that anyone understands. In which case, it seems that Rajoy, by intending to persecute one of the biggest drivers of the Spanish economy, actually want the economy to decline and Spaniards to be poorer.

In the meantime, let's hope that Spanish clothing manufacturers wake-up to the havoc they are causing in Spain.