Emigration from Italy After the Crisis: The Shortcomings of the Brain Drain Narrative

The financial and economic international crisis of 2008 aggravated, if anything, the political and economic instability Italy has been struggling with at least since the early 1990s. Italy has steadily had a positive net migration since 1974, thus becoming a country of immigration. Yet there have always been relatively significant numbers of people leaving the country, up to the so-called nuove mobilità (“new mobility”) of the 2000s–2010s, publicly described as a recurrence of past mass emigration and increasingly linked with the effect of the crisis. The chapter describes in detail the socio-demographic profile of the Italian emigrants and their main European destinations since the 2000s, relying on Italian data, collected by the ministries of the Interior, Foreign Affairs and Labor, the National statistical office (ISTAT). Data are critically assessed against the available statistical sources from the top European destination countries. The analysis then focuses on the public discourse concerning the most recent outflows and the policy responses to them. In particular, the chapter considers the questions of how current emigration intertwines with the recent labour market reforms, by which young people have access almost exclusively to insecure, highly-flexible, low-paid jobs and whether the hegemonic narrative focusing on the “brain drain” is consistent with the data on the human capital of those who have left and might leave.