MADRID, Spain - Spain will pay jobless immigrants to go home under a decree approved Friday, more evidence of how its once-booming economy has quickly gone bust.

Labor Minister Celestino Corbacho said the Cabinet approved the measure under a fast-track procedure and it will take effect in about a month.

The plan targets tens of thousands of non-European Union citizens who have been laid off in Spain and are entitled to unemployment benefits. It offers them a lump sum payment of 40 percent of that money once they renounce their work and residency permits, and the rest once they get home.

The voluntary program applies to people from 19 non-EU countries with which Spain has signed bilateral accords under which social security benefits accrued in one nation can be paid in the other.

Those who sign up for it must agree not to return to Spain for three years, with the promise they will be able to recover their work and residency permits after that.

Spain is grappling with ever-swelling jobless ranks in an economy that had posted more than a decade of solid growth but is now flirting with recession. Unemployment is now an EU-high of 10.7 percent, according to the bloc's statistical agency.

The government said in July it believed some 10,000 jobless non-EU citizens — out of a total of 165,000 recorded as of that month — would go along with the plan.

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