Sliding doors : Italy has an "in and out" migration problem - and it's not what they think it is

 

There has been a modicum of brouhaha in Italy about an interesting bit of info coming out of an European Research Council Report, available here: Namely, Italy has received most of the Grants by number, Yay! Only, it didn't.

For a country with limited investment and a smaller population than Germany, 60 mln vs 83 mln, Italy has done an incredible job....abroad. Here's the missing part: Italy ranks first by Researcher's nationality, and 8th, by a country mile, as hosting nation. Yep, we will scale up one since probably next year the UK will drop off the list.... but I don't know and I don't care about how much Italy will drop due to some of its researchers being UK based.

 

I DO have a conflict of interest talking about “Brain Drain” since I happily shipped off my daughter abroad for her Master, fully expecting her to never come back to live here. She always has been a “citizen of the World”, chafing at the stifling atmosphere surrounding her. It's also entirely possible that I'll end up going two for two and see my son going abroad as well... but they are not relevant, in a modern youth that has much more freedom of movement. The question that no one in Italy asks, in the brief intervals between lamenting “We are losing our best and brightest!”, is:

 “Why on Earth foreigners wanting to set up shop avoid Italy like the plague?”.

I live in Turin, my son before switching to another faculty went to the “Politecnico”, and it's a thriving hotbed of foreign students coming here to study in a challenging and advanced faculty. Some of the Teaching professors are friends of mine, one was at Caltech for years, he's the recipient of various technical prizes. Yet, Turin is not “Italy's silicon valley”, and neither is Milan. I also have dear friends there, but numbers lie only a little. Houston, we have a problem, and it's not our kids going out: Hans, Francois and Pablo do not come here to live and make a living. Study, yes. Stay on, no.

But concentrating on the high end is a kind of haughtiness. Let's go for what could derisively be described as the bottom of the pile.... while it is not.

Italy is the port of call of much of the EU's illegal immigration, which is a bit of a pickle since the Dublin treaty says that immigrants must be processed at the port of call. An immigrant who entered Italy then absconded to France, if caught is shipped by France to Italy.

We depict immigrants entering Italy on rickety inflatables that sinks more often than not as a desperate flow of exploited and disorganized people, but that's quite far from the truth. I know many an accomplished Italian professional who couldn't even trace their route on a map with an instruction book, let alone fund, organize and set up such a long trip, in a more or less clandestine way. An Afghan disembarking off a wooden contraption in Pantelleria may have kept his timeline flexible, but it cannot be said that he did not know what his target destination was or that he did not plan for that.

What I find totally disconcerting in the debate is a missing realization: Italy is EU's Libya.

Most of the people who escaped the shores of Tripoli are not aiming for the Halls of Montezuma, and they are not planning to come to Italy at all: they want to go to the REAL Europe, Northwest of the Alps, and they are prepared to do anything possible to cross. As an Italian and as a father, I have to trust their judgement: they have no emotional attachment to the “Bel Paese”, they have good intel from their friends and cousins who already made the trip, and they are literally voting with their feet... and sometimes dying in the process2. I grew up in the valley that Hannibal used to enter Italy, in a small town not two miles from a choke point where Charlemagne defeated the Longobards in 773 AD. The French – Italian border has seen in the recent past multiple cases of these poor people caught and immediately sent back by the French3, and there have been cases where the ever vigilant Sons of De Gaulle have been seen on the Italian side of the border4, to deter further attempts.

So.... I understand and am not bothered by the brain drain ( with the proviso that I am actually funding two instances in house). But I am bothered by the fact that  while we send bright young minds to Sweden or Holland, the reverse does not happen: even outsiders given half the chance flee Italy, tout suite. But apparently, either I am stupid as usual, or this is an hot button that one doesn't press.

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