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Italy's brain drain increases, involving millennials: report

Xinhua, October 7, 2016 Adjust font size:

More than 100,000 Italians have moved abroad in the last year, marking a further increase in the brain drain affecting the country, a report said on Thursday.

A little more than 4.8 million Italians were officially living abroad up to Jan. 1, 2016, according to the report "Italians in the World" by Migrantes Foundation.

Some 107,529 people decided to settle in another country during 2015 only, marking a 6.2 percent rise compared to the previous year.

The figures unveiled by the Migrantes Foundation were based on official data drawn from the Registry of Italians Resident Abroad (AIRE) and the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), both not including those who move abroad but leave their residence in Italy.

People between the ages of 18 and 34 represented the largest section, or 36.7 percent, within the new expatriates in 2015, followed by those aged 35-49 that made 25.8 percent.

Over 20,000 of them left from Lombardy, and over 10,000 from Veneto, two of the most wealthy and developed regions in the north of Italy.

The "Italians in the World" report has been tracking the number of people moving abroad since 2005, showing an upward trend.

"From 2006 to 2016, the Italian mobility has increased by 54.9 percent, from a little more than 3 million people enrolled (in AIRE) to over 4.8 million," it said.

Italian men aged 30-34, and single, made the majority of all of them. Yet, a further increase in the number of young people leaving was stated in the latest report: so-called "millennials", or people aged 18-32, constituted over one-third of all Italians expatriating last year.

Their choice contributed to Italy's brain drain: their generations have in fact the highest level of education, but face the highest level of unemployment in the country.

Indeed, Italy's youth jobless rate was 38.8 percent in August, according to ISTAT. It had reached staggering record-highs in March 2014 and July 2015, with 43.7 percent and 44.2 percent respectively.

"The millennials are the first mobile generation in the country, which is undoubtedly a positive element," Migrantes Foundation observed.

"Their mobility is in progress, and may constantly change, because it is not based on a certain plan of migration but on the new opportunities they encountered."

Yet, the trend has increasingly become a necessity rather than a choice, the report warned. "If mobility is an "escape", something regarded as the only chance to build a decent future, then it becomes a constraint," the authors pointed out.

The Migrantes study recalled that some 43 percent of Italian millennials consider emigration "as the only opportunity to achieve their goals, and as the only way out of a stuck country," according to a recent survey by Milan-based Giuseppe Toniolo Institute.

"Italy seems to give little hope to young people... and millennials are the first generation for which the choice is not so much whether to leave, but whether to stay," the report concluded. Enditem