The rise in emigration might just herald the emergence of a more self-sufficient, curious, and less spoiled generation
In Portugal, having an optimistic start to 2011 hasn't been easy. Along with Greece and Ireland, Portugal is currently one of the three weakest economies in the eurozone: the press seems primed for our downfall. The minority socialist government led by José Sócrates says the budget deficit, thought to be 7.3% of GDP in 2010, needs to decrease to 4.6% this year.
Experts expect that Portugal will soon be forced to access the IMF financial stability fund, and Teixeira dos Santos, the finance minister, recently went on a "successful" visit to China in order to secure financial support. The country seems to be on sale. Organisations and enterprises are shrinking their budgets. Unemployment rates are at 10.9%. My friends in Lisbon tell me: "Don't come back. Things are so depressing over here."
Many choose to put their feet on the ground and move away to another country. The young are running fastest of all, and they are making experts in Portugal worry about a new emigration wave, which is seen as the biggest since the 1960s. More than two million Portuguese are estimated to be living abroad. Recent research by the economist Álvaro Santos Pereira says that around 6.5% of the 10 million population have left the country between 1998 and 2008 – a number that could be even higher in the next census in 2011. What is different from the previous wave of migration in the 1960s is that these new emigrants are most likely young, highly skilled, and choose new countries like Spain and the UK. A 2006 report by the World Bank warned that Portugal was suffering from serious brain drain, with 13% of graduates emigrating.
Conventional wisdom will tell us that these kind if emigration rates create at least two problems for a country: brain deficit, since there isn't a significant highly skilled immigration to fuel the workforce, and population shrinkage, because the birth rate is slowing down. Both facts can have a major long-term impact on social security funds.
And yet, it's worth asking if emigration on this scale is always necessarily a bad thing. Consider, for one, that one traditional reason behind Portugal's economic weaknesses has been our laissez-faire attitude to work. Statistics portray a youth that is averse to risk-taking, values comfort and longs for security. The Portuguese social structure is shaped by dependent children or married people.
A Dutch friend was telling me the other day that he left his parents' home at 18 – in Portugal, almost 60% of young adults between 18 and 34 still live at their parents, one of the EU's highest rates according to a 2008 Eurostat survey (in the UK it is about 40%). Telling a Portuguese son or a daughter to find his or her own apartment at 18 would be unthinkable, the equivalent of abandoning a child in the wild. There is no tradition of flatsharing; when middle-class twentysomethings get out of their parents' house, it's usually to get married.
The high number of young people leaving the country might indicate that something is changing in the Portuguese mindset. It might just herald the emergence of a more self-sufficient, curious, and less spoiled generation.
The European Union has had a major impact in those born in the 1980s, a generation who grew up during the economic growth of the 1990s and have paid their bills with the euro since 1999. Enrolling in international scholar programmes such as Erasmus has become common; plus, foreign students come and go to Portuguese universities, and international networks expand. Travelling is much more regular for them than it was for me – my first flight was at 18, which makes my nephews laugh. The world, and especially Europe to where this new emigration wave is heading, has become a less frightening place. Might this generation have the competitive edge that has previously been lacking in the country?
The question remains whether these highly skilled workers would want to go back to Portugal once they've found success abroad. The scientist António Damásio or the artist Paula Rego are only two of many successful Portuguese emigrants who have decided to settle abroad permanently. A side effect of our Roman Catholic heritage is that we aren't very good at praising people for their successes and rewarding merit. Portuguese elites are suspicious and small; they are distant from the rest of the population, which in turn does not trust them either – as shown in research conducted by the sociologist Manuel Villaverde Cabral in 2004. We have problems with words like meritocracy and competitiveness, seen as part of a vocabulary used by capitalists or by over-achievers.
How would those who went abroad and increased their cultural capital fit in a milieu that ejects outliers when it is supposed to appreciate them? That's the conundrum. The question of how to convert the value of an individual's journey into a public benefit has yet to be solved in Portugal.
Author - Joana Gorjão Henriques
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