“I came. I saw. I left.” That’s the new motto of Italy’s youth. Over 150,000 Italians have relocated to London in the past eight years. But what’s particularly noteworthy is that almost two-thirds of those new arrivals are under the age of 35.
Italy has always had a certain amount of “brain-drain,” or emigration of the educated and skilled – the authors of this article are both children of Italian émigrés. However, in the years since the 2008 financial crisis, young people have flowed out of the country at an alarming rate. By 2014, net migration was negative; the number of Italians emigrating exceeded the number of foreign nationals immigrating to the country, with almost 50,000 young Italians leaving the country last year alone. But the sentiment behind this flight seem to be even further reaching than pure emigration statistics would suggest; a survey conducted last fall revealed that almost two-thirds of young Italians would leave their country if they had the means.
It seems that a combination of factors has stretched young people’s patience to a breaking point. Many of these are longstanding realities of living la dolce vita. Compared with its European neighbors, Italy has a distinct lack of meritocracy; connections and family money are both still crucial. “When I go to a young entrepreneurs’ group in America, I meet young entrepreneurs,” Luigi Zingales, an Italian economist, told The Economist in 2016. “In Italy, I primarily meet trust-fund kids who are there thanks to their parents, not their accomplishments.” For instance, La Sapienza, Rome’s most prestigious university, is plagued by favoritism in 2010, a third of the faculty counted close family members among their colleagues. Even university admissions are tainted by corruption: Two years ago, a box of university entrance exams at the University of Bari was tampered with before the test, leaving many skeptical of the fairness of the exam. This leaves the education and careers of young Italians up to a corrupt and nepotistic system, leading many to feel that their skills and qualifications are not duly recognized.
In an interview with Brown Political Review, Beppe Severgnini, one of Italy’s leading journalists, explained that the main issue young people face in their education is a total lack of accountability. “It’s not even possible to translate this word into Italian,” Severgnini joked, describing the way that faculty in Italian universities can treat their jobs and obligations with minimal care and face few consequences. Italian students lacking family connections must become independent and resourceful. “In a perverse manner, in those universities it becomes a sort of natural selection,” he said. “I’ve taught in the US, where, whether you’re a better student or a weaker student, there’s a wave that brings everyone out.” But once these talented students make it through the system, many of them leave — particularly those who have already made the jump from the South to the North, where the quality of higher education tends to be higher. “I call it the ‘triple jump,’” Severgnini said. “So they go from Palermo to Rome to Berlin. Or Bari to Torino to Boston. Bang; bang; bang.”
Laws that largely favor Italy’s older generations complicate the situation. More than any other country in Europe, Italy’s public spending is disproportionately skewed toward the elderly, with 14 percent of its gross domestic product and 57 percent of all social spending going toward pensions. The country also experiences a generational split in the job market. Well-intentioned job security legislation means that older generations are able to maintain the same jobs well into their sixties, while young people scramble for a limited number of short-term contracts. As Severgnini put it, “the system is biased in favor of those who are already secure.” Once they’ve managed to obtain employment, young Italians are forced to settle for very low wages. In 2013, the average salary for an Italian born in the 1980s was about $1,375 per month, not nearly enough for a comfortable life in Rome or Milan. In protest of perceived gerontocracy, banners bearing the slogan “Italy is not a country for young people” frequently fly across the nation.
These longstanding factors finally became intolerable after the 2008 financial crisis. In July of last year, youth unemployment in the country hit a historic peak of 44.2 percent; in many southern regions, the figure came closer to 75 percent. In such times of crisis, Italy’s lack of meritocracy and favoring of older generations becomes especially stifling, with high levels of competition for very few jobs. Discouraged by their country’s bleak employment prospects and disillusioned with a government that hasn’t improved their situation, tens of thousands of young Italians are taking advantage of cheap European airfares and taking their talents elsewhere.
The emigration of Italy’s young people might be less concerning if those people were being replaced at a normal rate. But Italy suffers from one of the lowest birth rates in the world, at 1.4 births per woman — far below the replacement rate. Nor are the young Italians being replaced by young people from other countries. “It’s a one-way system,” Severgnini explained. The combination of these factors means that Italy could be heading for an unprecedented demographic vacuum. Last year Italy’s population fell for the first time since World War I — by 150,000 people, approximately the size of the city of Ancona. With the lower end of its population pyramid rapidly shrinking, a group of fewer working Italians must support a vast number of the older generation, leading the country’s economy and demography into even shakier territory.
Italy’s economic problems aren’t new. Since joining the Eurozone, Italy has faced a huge slump in productivity and growth. Many economists see this deficit as a product of Italy’s inability to compete in a globalized economy rather than a product of the new currency. Much of this problem concerns the size of Italy’s firms. Almost 70 percent of Italians work in companies with fewer than 50 people; in the United States, such firms compose only a third of the workforce. Not only do these small companies face difficulty globalizing, but they’re also unable to conduct high-level technological development, making them an economic hindrance. Although the EU is optimistic about the coming year, having projected Italian GDP growth at 1.5 percent, Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan seems to be wary: “There is recovery, but [the economy] is still weak.” The road to recovery is significantly complicated by the outflow of young people — stemming it is thus crucial for Italy’s future. Italy is clearly not alone in its problems; countries like Spain and Greece face similar levels of debt and unemployment, and the EU has experienced declining birth rates for years. But as the eight largest economy in the world, there is a sense that something more is at stake with Italy; a strong Italy is important for the European and global economies.
The optimistic Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and his government may bring much-needed change. Of the several reforms it has already pushed, one in particular represents hope for Italy’s beleaguered youth. The “Jobs Act” has reconfigured Italy’s labor market, which until recently had been a major obstacle for young people. Entry-level positions dramatically affect both career outcomes and long-term earnings, and until recently, even employed young Italians often found only short-term contracts. This was largely due to the rigorous process a firm had to go through to fire an employee, allowing many older and unqualified workers to stay in jobs for which young and talented university graduates would be better suited. The Jobs Act includes sections offering benefits like the extension of partially paid maternity leave and increased contract flexibility. Additionally, it makes the rules for firing workers much simpler, which will hopefully allow younger Italians to find work more easily. Severgnini, for one, is optimistic about the Jobs Act’s potential to change the situation: “The instinct of the Renzi government, which I can criticize on other things, is right on this issue.”
But demographics will present a more difficult challenge, and Renzi cannot repopulate the country on his own. Fortunately, some more practical solutions exist. Elsewhere in the EU, France has been successful in increasing birthrates, offering 16 weeks of paid maternity leave for the first child and 26 for the third along with subsidized day care and tax breaks for families with children. These measures have been effective, and Italy could benefit from implementing some of them, as day care is currently expensive and scarce. In Severgnini’s opinion, the issues of youth emigration and falling birth rates are not necessarily separate. “We need to both create conditions for young people to stay in Italy and appeal to young Italian couples that want to have children,” he said. “There need to be policies so that having a child isn’t so expensive.”
Though currently unpopular in the European political atmosphere, a second clear solution exists to Italy’s population troubles: accepting migrants. Italy is the second largest migrant receiving country in the EU. Through better training programs, the nation could help migrants become productive members of society and concurrently bolster its workforce. But Severgnini, for one, is skeptical that this solution will survive within the Italian political arena. The prominence of the xenophobic but popular Italian conservative party, Lega Nord, suggests that such skepticism may be justified. But if this solution were more widely accepted, it could certainly allow for the replacement of many of the young people that have left, and help pave the way for vibrant younger generations of Italian citizens. Regardless of the method, it’s clear that the issue of bolstering Italy’s young population is of great importance.
Solving the phenomenon of youth emigration, then, will involve getting to the root of many of Italy’s most entrenched problems — which, whether institutional corruption, slow bureaucracy, gerontocracy, or lack of accountability, Italy’s young people just aren’t willing to stand.
Art by Emma Lloyd