Consequences
The Council of Castile evaluated the expulsion in 1619 and concluded that it had no economic impact for the country. This was basically true for Castile, as some scholars of the expulsion have found no economic consequences on sectors where the Morisco population was important. However, in the Kingdom of Valencia, fields were abandoned and a vacuum was left in sectors of the economy the Christians could not possibly fill. With the removal by 33% of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Valencia, some counties in the north of Alicante lost virtually their entire population. The infrastructure decayed, and the Christian nobles and landlords fell into arrears. Strapped for cash, many of the Valencian nobles increased rents on their Christian tenants to get even close to their previous income. The increase in rents drove off any new tenants from coming to replace them, and as a result agricultural output in Valencia dropped tremendously.
The expulsion of 4% of the population may seem minor, but it should be noted that the Morisco population was a larger part of the civilian workforce than their numbers would make seem. Practically no Moriscos were trusted to be noblemen, soldiers, or priests. This meant that there was a noticeable decline in tax collection, and the most affected areas (Valencia and Aragon) were economically damaged for decades.
The expulsion was a crippling blow not just to the economies of Aragon and Valencia, but also the power of their nobles. The former Crown of Aragon had been in the shadow of the richer and more populous Crown of Castile for some time, but with this, their stature dropped still further. Of the Eastern Kingdoms themselves, the Catalonian nobles now rose to prominence, their incomes far less affected. Thus the expulsion helped shift power away from its traditional centers in Valencia and Aragon to Catalonia.
According to Professor Dwight Reynolds "perhaps the most shocking thing in the expulsion is they were not actually expelling Arabs nor were they expelling Berbers. The huge majority of the people that were being expelled, by blood, by DNA if you will, were as Iberian as their Christian cousins in the North who were kicking them out of Peninsula".
In 2006, a proposal was made to return Spanish citizenship to the descendants of the Moriscos as an apology and acknowledgement of mistakes from the Inquisitional persecution, forced relocations, and exile. The proposal has not yet been materialized, in part due to the difficulty in safely identifying Morisco ancestry.
Read more about this topic: Expulsion Of The Moriscos
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