Taking advantage of Europe’s brain drain

FOR decades, Spain and Portugal have lured poor immigrants from their former colonies.

Now, in a historic role reversal, these one-time empire builders are seeing legions of frustrated young people head to old dominions in search of a better life.

Europe’s ruinous debt crisis and job-sapping economic miseries are reshaping migration trends, with a generation of home-grown talent looking for economic rewards on continents once treated with disdain.

Portuguese are packing their bags for booming Angola and Mozambique, and for emerging economic powerhouse Brazil, where there is a shortage of engineers to prepare the country for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Spaniards are being drawn to their former colonies in Latin America.

While analysts say the true scale of the new migration is still hard to determine because official statistics lag behind trends, anecdotal evidence and fragmentary data point to what’s going on.

Portugal’s Emigration Observatory says the number of Portuguese registered at consulates in Brazil jumped from 678,822 in 2009 to 705,615 the following year. In Angola, the number went from almost 57,000 in 2008 to just over 74,500 in 2009. The number of Mozambican residence permits granted to Portuguese in 2010, meanwhile, was up almost 13% on the previous year, to nearly 12,000.

Spanish electoral registers show around 30,000 Spaniards moved to Argentina between June 2009 and November 2010 — an 11% increase over that period. Some 6,400 went to Chile — a jump of 24% in the same timeframe — and 6,800 headed for Uruguay, an increase of 16%.

In Spain, where one in five are out of work, opportunities in Latin America have become a magnet for those whose career hopes are thwarted by a grinding recession.

“The emerging markets are where it’s happening, that’s where the jobs are,” says Jorge Borges, a 35-year-old Portuguese civil engineer.

Disheartened by bleak career prospects in Portugal, whose crippling debt crisis forced the country to seek a bailout like Greece and Ireland, Borges crossed the border five years ago and tapped into Spain’s building boom. Then the overleveraged Spanish economy collapsed, and Borges lost his job. Now he wants to move on again, but Europe’s wretched economies are not an option — and his online job hunt is targeting vacancies in Brazil and Angola, distant Portuguese-speaking countries. “The first chance I get, I’m going overseas,” Borges said from Zaragoza, Spain.

Brazil in particular is a magnet. The South American giant is recruiting foreign civil engineers and architects to meet demand for major public works projects, including more than $200 billion — close to Portugal’s annual GDP — in energy infrastructure. Brazil’s economy grew 7.5% in 2010, the highest growth rate since 1986, and is expected to expand by more than 5% per year through 2014.

“The big drive is to Brazil,” Carlos Matias Ramos, president of Portugal’s national association of engineers, says of recent emigration among his members. “They’re mostly young people.”

Spain is struggling to overcome nearly two years of recession triggered by the collapse of a real estate bubble. In Portugal, a decade of scrawny growth drove unemployment to a record 11.2% last year and left it saddled with monumental debts.

Ireland and Greece, as well as more robust France and Italy, also report they are bleeding talent as young globe-trotters take flight.

“The first to leave (in a crisis) are always the ones with the most marketable skills,” says Demetrios Papademetriou, the president of the non-profit Migration Policy Institute in Washington, DC, who also chairs the World Economic Forum’s migration task force.

Smart, creative and dynamic graduates provide vital fuel to stoke national economies, and the flight of this generation is “one of the most consequential byproducts of the (European) crisis”, according to Papademetriou.

He says he has warned Europe’s political leaders that the brain drain demands just as much attention as fiscal measures devised to reduce the crushing national debt at the heart of the continent’s current troubles.

“They are losing the people who can get them either out of the crisis long-term or who will be needed to start and fuel the recovery,” he said.

Spanish architect Xavier Casas may be one of those people. He gave up his business in Barcelona a year ago after work dried up and moved with his Argentine wife, Luciana, to Rafaela, a town 530 kilometres north of Buenos Aires.

“We’re working flat out now,” the 31-year-old said, adding that he encountered a continent that “is really thriving”.

In a rare public comment on Spain’s economic difficulties, King Juan Carlos chose to highlight the graduates’ predicament in a recent ceremony where he handed out scholarships for foreign study programs.

“I sincerely hope and wish that when your time comes to return home there are more jobs for you and that you can stay here because we really need you at the moment in Spain,” the monarch told the assembled students.