Madrid -- After announcing this week the end of new visas for low-skilled workers, Spain's Minister for work and immigration, Celestino Corbacho, elaborated on plans to pay potentially hundreds of thousands of unemployed foreigners to go home, primarily to Latin America. No mention has been made of changing  work visa authorizations for high-skilled workers.

Under the new scheme, scheduled to begin in September, immigrants would receive two years worth of up-front unemployment benefits - 40% when they volunteer for the scheme in Spain, the rest on arrival back in their country of origin.

Faced with the highest unemployment rate in Europe, 10.7%, the government's policy change is a reversal for Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who has prided himself on being immigrant-friendly since taking office in 2004.

The new policy may help relations with other EU countries who felt Zapatero's 2005 amnesty to 600,000 undocumented foreigners would lure waves of other illegal immigrants who could cross into France and elsewhere in the new border-free Europe.

Foreigners who come to do seasonal work like picking strawberries or other produce would not be affected, the Labor Ministry says.

Rather, the plan focuses on people who until now were granted open-ended contracts and did low-skill jobs like cleaning Spaniards' houses or working in shops for less than €1,000 ($1,4300) a month.

Economists have derided the new plan, saying that even if all those jobs had gone to unemployed people already in Spain — the goal of the Corbacho plan — it would barely make a dent in the jobless rate.