MADRID, Spain (DPA) – As Spain’s crisis-hit economy sinks into a new recession, a scarcely visible but constant wave of emigration is slowly draining the country of its human resources.

Some of the most highly educated Spaniards are crossing frontiers to look for work elsewhere, and hundreds of thousands of foreign immigrants are also returning home, making the country’s population shrink for the first time in decades.

“A constant trickle of vitality... is quietly leaving our country,’’ literature professor Concha Caballero writes. She described the emigrants as a “lost generation’’ that will “cost us dear in the form of backwardness, intellectual and technological impoverishment.’’

Spain is among the European countries that has suffered most from the global financial crisis. The economy will shrink by 1.7 percent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. The unemployment rate of 21.5 percent – the European Union’s highest – is expected to continue rising.

“If only I spoke foreign languages,’’ says Jose, a 50-year-old engineer who only finds occasional jobs. If he spoke German or even only English, Jose says, he would immediately head for Germany, which needs tens of thousands of engineers.

Many Spaniards or immigrants living in Spain have already done what Jose would like to do.

In 2011, 50,000 more people moved out of Spain than came in, according to the statistics body INE. The 500,000 who left the country included 63,000 Spaniards. But the real numbers of Spaniards emigrating could be much higher, given that many of them do not register with Spanish consulates in the countries where they settle.

Spain has experienced other periods of emigration, ranging from people fleeing hunger to Cuba in the 19th century, to the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, when some 2 million went to look for work in Germany, France, and other northern European countries in the 1960s and 70s.

As Spain gradually caught up with wealthier and more modern European countries, it developed from a country of emigrants into one of immigrants, whose numbers soared from less than 2 percent of the population to about 12 percent in two decades. That trend is now being reversed, after the global crisis and the simultaneous meltdown of Spain’s important property sector hit the economy hard.

The return of Latin American, Moroccan, and other immigrants to their countries of origin, as well as the departure of many native Spaniards, along with a relatively low birth rate, will cause the country’s population to plunge from 46.1 to 45.5 million in a decade, the statistics body INE predicts.

Today’s typical Spanish emigrant is very different from his or her predecessors, who took trains north to look for low-paid jobs as cleaners or factory workers. The new emigrant is much better prepared, having university education and language skills.

Spanish doctors, architects, economists, and others are joining the workforce in countries ranging from Germany, Britain, or Switzerland to China or Algeria. Many of them head for Latin America, which has fast-growing economies and where they face no language barriers.