Beyond the point of no return

While emigration is regarded as an unwanted byproduct of recession, the ebb and flow of migrants around the globe benefits both the destination countries and our own when they eventually return, writes Kyran FitzGerald

EVERY deep recession is unique in its grimness. But one thing unites almost all of them: they are followed by a big outward movement on the part of the country’s youth.

A jobs shakeout is inevitably accompanied by an upsurge in migration from the region, or country affected.

For more than a century after the Famine, rural Ireland, lacking enough home-grown factories packed its people off to the boats. The port of Cobh became the focal point for great grief. Regret over the loss of sons and daughters to the emigrant boat became a deep part of the Irish psyche.

Remittances from the US, in particular, from single aunts and uncles, in particular, helped educate new generations for the boat.

The departures have at regular intervals continued to drain outlying economies, in particular of their life force, the high spending, family forming vital young.

The silent grief among those left behind, the fury engendered among the more radical, sensing that migration was serving as a safety valve sapping revolutionary fervour — all this tended to block rational discussion about the potential benefits to be derived from migration.

We forget from our island vantage point that massive movements of population, sometimes enforced at the barrel of a gun, have been a feature of history, in particular that of the twentieth century, from the Russian pogroms in the Jewish “bund” during the 1900s to the mass dislocations in post Second World War Europe.

Few nations benefited more from the enforced scattering of Jewish academics and intellectuals than the US: its universities rose to prominence on the back of talented refugees such as Albert Einstein. American Ivy League universities were still drawing on this well of imported talent through the 1980s.

The Chinese diaspora came into being following the Japanese invasion and the subsequent Communist takeover of Mainland China.

Skilled Chinese people have established trading centres right across the Pacific, using Hong Kong as a focal point. Increasingly, these expatriate Chinese are building links with the mainland as its economy has opened up and expanded.

The Chinese have expanded using family/kinship networks.

America accounted for the lion’s share of Irish emigrants up until the Second World War, when Britain became the main recipient, accounting for perhaps four in five at one point as Britain enjoyed a post war building boom.

Each wave of Irish emigration from the 1950s through to the 1980s and on to the post-2008 period has been marked by its own set of characteristics.

Broadly speaking, the education level of each successive generation leaving has risen.

An IDA Ad containing a photo of young graduates appeared in Dublin airport in the 1980s. It emerged that almost all the people pictured had left the country. The media had a field day.

However, Ireland’s small open economy has a habit of eventually rebounding from the crises it cooks up for itself. A safe bet is that the majority of those pictured did eventually return, while no doubt continuing to lead peripatetic lives, using no doubt well filled contact books.

In the Noughties, Ireland became for the first time, the recipient of immigrant labour on a very large scale. From the early 1990s, no other European country experienced such a large increase in its labour force.

Indeed, one big difference with the last recession is that just over 1.8 million people are at work, here compared with around 1.1m, 25 years before.

The loss of 300,000 jobs has brought great pain and the return of net emigration. In 2012, the Economic & Social Research Institute has estimated that this could reach 70,000.

However, the position has been complicated by the fact that many of those leaving are people of non Irish origin, either returning home, or moving on to a new location.

It is easy to forget, as the dust of the economic crash settles, that such movement — though in less extreme patterns — is precisely what supporters of a Single European market should expect.

At least until the eurozone crisis reached a critical point, we were led to expect that Europe would, before too long, have a labour market along the lines of the US where people have long grown used to the idea that their job may take them from one side of the Continent to the other.

Indeed, high labour mobility is viewed as being part and parcel of the American dream, and as essential to the efficiency of the economy that produces the goods and services that power that dream.

The ESRI labour market expert, Philip O’Connell, admits that there is considerably uncertainty surrounding the data on emigration, not least because of uncertainties over national population estimates. At the last census, earlier this year, it emerged that the Irish population was around 100,000 greater than previously estimated.

O’Connell is just one of a many in his profession to secure work experience overseas and economists are more inclined than most to stress the benefits that come from a lengthy period spent overseas. There is increasing interest in the economic impact of emigration and in the coping mechanisms of migrants.

The World Bank has estimated that remittances were worth over $400bn to struggling economies in 2009, a figure which only takes account of sums sent through formal channels. Remittances account for 50% of the GDP of some countries.

On the flip side, the brain drain costs places like Africa dearly. There are currently more African scientists and engineers in the US than in Africa.

Only when those economies develop sufficiently can they reabsorb much of this drained talent as has happened with India and previously with Ireland.

What is clear is that the flow of migrants is gathering force all the time.

Today, there are over two hundred million third generation migrants around the world, 40% more than in 1990.

Joining the flow are increasing numbers of not just Irish, but Portuguese, Greek, Spanish, even italian.

Many are departing for the New world, for Brazil, Argentina, Australia — Greeks are heading to Melbourne, the Irish to Sydney, Italians and Spanish to Buenos Aires.

The number of Portuguese living in Brazil has risen from 277,000 to 330,000 in less than a year. Most leaving have been professionals — all severe downturns are followed by brain drains as the best get out of stagnant labour markets.

Worms have a habit of turning.

Barely, a decade ago, the Argentinian capital, Buenos Aires, was the epicentre of a financial crisis and people were getting out fast. Today, it is welcoming European migrants, including people on tourist visas, as workers.

Modern economies, like children, can recover as fast as they fall ill.

This should serve as a lesson to those who would be tempted to wallow in despair.

The academic Ed Walsh returned to jump charge the NIHE in Limerick, later the University of Limerick. His successor, Don Barry, is a returned emigrant. The cycle is continuing.

Irish organisations continue to benefit from an infusion of talented people, many of whom have had their eyes opened through exposure to less insular communities as migrants Emigration is a symptom, an unpleasant one — the effects, in truth, are often felt hardest by parents.

There are of course exceptions to every rule, but Irish people have proven adaptable from doctors and nurses in 1970s and 1980s; Baghdad to McAlpine’s Fusiliers to the Irish construction firm employees working on motorways in Poland and oil rigs in Siberia.

Philip O’Connell for one believes that policymakers here should concentrate on reviving the economy. Once that occurs, all else flows. Regions that were drained of their life-force move rapidly into recovery as that great Irish reserve army of labour, men and women with newly acquired capital, skills and children returns home to repopulate the valleys, if not the hills.