ARGENTINA: College Students Want to Leave Due to Dim Prospects

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Sep 19 2000 (IPS) - A majority of university students polled in Argentina said they would prefer to emigrate, complaining of strangled prospects for professional growth and development at home.

“What leads Argentines to suggest that people search for new horizons does not appear to be so much their actual economic situation, but the dim prospects they perceive with respect to the development of this country,” Hartmut Hentschel, director of Demoskopia, a marketing research and political studies institute that carried out a survey on the question this month, told IPS.

The installation of a new government last December brought a natural rise in expectations, which later turned into a deep sense of disappointment as the months went by and it became clear that the economic model had not changed and that President Fernando De la Rúa was not keeping his campaign pledges, he said.

According to the Demoskopia survey, 42 percent of respondents said they would recommend that a young university graduate emigrate, 26 percent marked the “it depends” box, while just 25 percent — and a slightly higher proportion among women — would advise young professionals to stay.

But among young respondents, 52 percent recommended emigration as a solution — a proportion that jumped to 63 percent among university students, who feel “great scepticism regarding the future,” the study observed.

A mere 8.1 percent of college students — most of whom attended public universities — said they would recommend Argentina as a place where it was possible to develop and grow professionally, regardless of one’s opportunities to emigrate.

The consulates of Germany, Australia, Canada, the United States, Spain and Italy reported that from January to August, consultations and applications for visas, passports and dual citizenship were 30 percent up on the same period last year.

However, no official statistics were available.

The consulates of Italy and Spain point out that there have not been so many consultations and requests for information by people considering emigrating since the four-digit hyperinflation that shook the country in the late 1980s.

“I don’t want to finish a university degree and end up working as a taxi-driver,” one high school student waiting in line at the Spanish consulate earlier this month told IPS.

In her last year at a prestigious public prep school, the Colegio Nacional Buenos Aires, affiliated with the University of Buenos Aires, the 18-year-old decided to apply for the Spanish citizenship to which she is entitled because her grandparents came here from Spain.

They came as poor immigrants in search of opportunity, and today their granddaughter wants to set out on her own search — but in Madrid, where she plans to study law, convinced that she’ll find “better possibilities for professional growth” and a successful career in Spain.

In Argentina, unemployment and under-employment currently stand at 15.4 and 14.4 percent, respectively, while a full 37 percent of the unemployed and 37.6 percent of the under-employed have post- secondary schooling.

“We all know a lot of psychologists working for no pay in hospitals, or professionals who do not show up in surveys as unemployed just because they are working at any other job,” said Hentschel.

A psychiatrist interviewed this month by the daily ‘Página 12’, Domingo Grande, said “those queueing up in the consulates are people who feel abandoned,” who are not only brought to their decision to emigrate by economic straits.

Hentschel agreed. Contrary to popular wisdom, people “don’t run away” because of economic difficulties, he said, pointing out that “the poorest and least educated are those who have the fewest possibilities for making plans to go abroad.”

Those who recommend leaving tend to be people who have “a lot to contribute to development, but who have little confidence in government policies, which lead them to ask themselves ‘how will I build a career in a country that has no place for me?” said Hentschel.

He suggested that the government take note of the survey to gain a better understanding of how to provide “real” educational and employment opportunities for today’s young people, in order to curtail the ‘brain drain’ of the country’s most promising human resources.

But early this month, when the high number of visits to foreign consulates was pointed out, President De la Rúa downplayed the phenomenon, which he described as merely part of a “normal” flow of people deciding to enter or leave the country.

The president’s response coincided with the release of a survey by the Gallup polling firm, which for the past 12 years has been asking Argentines if they would prefer to live elsewhere. This year, 21 percent of those interviewed said yes, a proportion that climbed to 33 percent among 18 to 24-year-olds.

Gallup found that the percentage of those who imagined a better future abroad dropped in 1991, when runaway inflation was curbed. But it set out on an upward spiral again in 1994, when the downside of the economic stabilisation model became painfully clear: soaring unemployment, which peaked at 18.4 percent that year.

Since then, the proportion of those who say they would like to leave has been rising, mainly among people from the middle, upper- middle, and upper classes — the better-off and better-educated.

The latest Gallup poll found that 33 percent and 29 percent of upper and middle-income respondents would like to emigrate, compared to 19 and 13 percent of those surveyed from the two lowest-income sectors.