Italians in the Wind September 14, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite , trackback
Italy has a long history of emigration. Between 1869 and 1939 eighteen and a half million Italians left their home country, travelling to all corners of the world. After the Second World War emigration started up again, particularly towards northern Europe, and there was massive internal migration as five million southern Italians came to the north of Italy to power ‘the economic miracle’, above all, in Turin, Genoa and Milan. Italy followed the trajectory of all industrializing nations, and emigration fell off as the country grew fat. However, and this is one of modern Italy’s dirty secrets, emigration has revived. From 2005 to 2015 emigration grew by an incredible 49%: and recent figures suggest that the trend is accelerating. Not only this, but the new migrants include a surprising number of young graduates and post graduates, many from the wealthier parts of northern Italy.
Why are so many well-educated Italians fleeing their home country? Consider one of the professions where Italy has traditionally excelled, pharmacy. To become a pharmacist in Italy you need to complete a five-year university degree and then pass a national exam. You are, subsequently, allowed to join the pharmacists’ guild and you can start to work as a licensed pharmacist. You will work hard, something that comes easily to Italians. This means eight hours a day and sometimes Saturdays and Sundays. Pharmacies are typically small, privately-owned firms and so there is little room for career advancement, unless you can muster the capital to buy a chemist’s yourself. A full-time pharmacist will earn, after taxes, about 1,500 euros a month. About a third or a half of what a British pharmacist would expect. Pharmacy was once considered a well-paid profession…
The pharmacist’s lot in Italy is not a rosy one, but nor does it seem likely to lead to emigration. This, though, is where a mere outline fails to do justice to experiences on the ground. Beach has assumed in this description that there are positions to be had. But just under half of Italians, aged 18 to 25, have no job, and that goes for graduates, as well. Most aspirant chemists find it hard to dig up even ‘limited contract’ positions. The real battle is, instead, to get a ‘permanent contract’, the indeterminato. The indeterminato is the increasingly unobtainable grail of the Italian middle classes, one that gives extraordinary guarantees to holders. Many Italians used to hold off getting married or having children until they signed one. This blogger recently came across a newly-graduated professional who had agreed to do a job without being paid for a year as her employer had promised her an indeterminato at the end of it. The indeterminato allows for maternity leave and other welfare rights; and it makes it practically impossible to sack a worker.
Italians have traditionally operated by an unspoken agreement with their masters. We the workers settle for lower wages and longer hours as long as we have an indeterminato. But, in the last fifteen years, following Italy’s decision to join the single currency, that unspoken agreement has been traduced. In itself this is no bad thing. The indeterminato guaranteed a number of expensive rights to the holders. It meant far too few to those who did not have this golden contract, but who had, of course, to pay taxes towards its upkeep. However, the indeterminato still operates for older Italians, and a smaller number of younger Italians, and continues to cripple the economy. The postwar generation enjoyed far higher incomes and higher rates of employment than their children and their grandchildren. Talking to Italians in their thirties Beach is often struck by how they earn half as much, in their jobs, as their gerontacratic parents receive by way of pensions.
These are the circumstances under which hundreds of thousands of Italians have decided to travel abroad. The figures are remarkable. In 2005, the numbers of Italian outside Italy stood at about three million. By 2015, the numbers had reached almost five million. The crisis of 2009 saw the first notable rises, hardly a surprise. But the numbers then kept accelerating, pointing to deeper problems, and they show no sign of abating. What is even more extraordinary is that this is taking place in a country facing a demographic downturn. These are not surplus citizens, too many mouths for too little bread. These are the hands and minds that Italy needs to earn its crust. Particularly alarming, is the ‘brain drain’. About 3,000 post docs go abroad a year, the worst figures in western Europe; and practically no foreign brains come to work in Italian universities. Italy is spending vast amounts training its young, only for these to be compelled to work in the Americas, northern Europe and, happily for the UK, Britain. In 2015 the European Research Council gave 302 major funding grants, and 30 of these were to Italians. This would have been a very respectable showing, only seventeen of the Italians awarded funding were working outside of Italy…
Of course, the paradox is that, as Italy has become again a country of emigration, so it has become a country, simultaneously, of immigration. It is true that most of the refugees and economic migrants washed up on the shores of Sicily want to go to London or Berlin. But a goodly number have chosen to remain among hospitable Italians. Many pizza-makers and bakers in central Italy, for example, are from northern Africa. This has coincided with important numbers of east Europeans coming to undertake temporary contracts in Italy, often to look after the elderly. What will be most important when we write the history of twenty-first-century Italy? The arrival of third-worlders and eastern blochers in Rome, Florence and Bologna? Or the hemorrhaging of Italian brains through the industrialized nations of the west? The first has its positive sides. The second is a marker for the collapse of Italy’s middle classes under the suffocating weight of the Euro.
Other data on Italian emigration: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com
25 Sep 2016, Judith from Zenobia: I applaud your post on Italian emigration. The brain drain indeed has potentially serious consequences. I’ve also noticed in our neck of the woods another drain taking place the children of many friends, of university students (undergrad as well as postgrad) going abroad to study. Many may never return. Statistics are unclear:
