With millions of young people in Europe still unemployed, the phenomenon of emigration has returned in many countries. Some people emigrate in an attempt to change their lifestyle and explore new exciting work opportunities abroad. For others it is a forced move to settle in countries that offer better economic prospects.
A visit to London will soon show how thousands of young Spanish and Italian people now work in the hotel, catering and retail industries. Some are there to learn English, but increasingly many others are trying to cash in on the better economic prospects that exist in the UK when compared to Spain or Italy.
Many EU migrants are graduates but are prepared to take any job they consider suitable to help them settle down in their new country of choice.
Perhaps the country with the greatest experience in the emigration phenomenon is Ireland. With a population of just 4.6 million, Ireland is no longer the Celtic Tiger it once was, even if its eco-nomy is slowly recovering. Some astonishing statistics are now emerging on how the Irish eco-nomy has been so badly hit by the seemingly endless recession that started in 2008.
In 2013, 89,000 people left Ireland. This is the highest number of emigrants ever as it eclipsed the highest year for the 1980s generation of emigrants, when in 1988 alone 70,600 left the island.
Of course, not all the emigrants who left Ireland in 2013 had been born there. Many were EU citizens who had gone to Ireland in the boom years, only to return home to Poland and other EU countries when hard times challenged the Irish economy.
One positive aspect of this current phenomenon is that in 2014 over 60,000 Irish migrants returned to Ireland. So the net outflow was not all that dramatic. One rather worrying statistic is that one in four Irish graduates who found work had emigrated in 2013.
Some may disagree that this is an expensive brain drain in a small country that has a good educational system. But the emigration of highly-qualified graduates is certainly a phenomenon that can delay future economic resurgence.
Home is where your heart is, and for most of us our heart will always be on our tiny islands
The human side of these evolving social trends is that leaving one’s country for whatever reason can cause pangs of painful home-sickness. The Irish Times recently carried a series of articles titled ‘Generation Emigration’ in which it tried to get some reactions of Irish people who had left their country to settle abroad, especially in other English-speaking countries like the US, Canada and Australia.
What comes out from the comments of these Irish migrants quoted in The Irish Times is how much they miss their homeland with its undeniable natural beauty.
Luke Cutliffe is a 30-year-old Irish recruitment consultant working in Sydney. “It can make you homesick seeing the build-up to Christmas at home, with images of shopping, cold weather, cosy pubs and ridiculous jumpers on Facebook feed.
“It’s everything I miss about Ireland all rolled into one week: family, friends, Dublin city and holidays.”
Sarah Griffin, from Dublin, is a writer who has now settled in San Francisco. She misses her homeland very bitterly. “Ireland online is not right for me – it is a pantomime of us, of how things were, and how things are. The truth is impossible to capture in something as flat as the internet – and the less I have engaged, the further I have pulled my hands from the keyboard, the closer to home I have felt. This winter I have been writing in pen and ink on paper at home ... cards, letters ... sending pieces of this world to that world, over the ocean.”
The importance of family life in Ireland is not any different from what it is in Malta. I recently met some of the Maltese doctors studying or working in UK hospitals. Most of them greatly miss their families in Malta and find ways of returning whenever they get the chance. We live in no Garden of Eden here, but home is where your heart is, and for most of us our heart is and will always be on our tiny islands.
My final thought is for those other thousands of migrants who come to our island not because they choose to, but because they want to escape from political and economic realities that are simply unbearable. They too have a right to dream about a better future and they deserve nothing but respect and support.
johncassarwhite@yahoo.com