I don’t like the term “expat”: today I am happy
“I don’t like being called an ‘Expat,’ it leaves me with a sense of escape and impermanence, and I never lost touch with Italy. In my suitcase I had more dreams than certainties. I have been living in Barcelona for five years and I do not feel like an escapee from Italy at all. I am happy, I have a Spanish partner with whom I am fine; I work in a hotel, I am a manager, I am paid almost twice what I would have earned staying at home. I finally found a meaning for my future life, which I did not have the possibility to imagine in Rome.”
This is Simona, 30, a business administration graduate, part of the approximately 3.2 million Expats, nearly half of whom are between 18 and 34 years old, 44 percent of whom are women living and working in the European Union, plus Britain, which is formally out of the Union as of Jan. 31, 2020. The Old Continent has now become the destination of choice for all Italians outside Italy: the flow is 75 percent of all those registered with Aire, the State Association of Italians Resident Abroad.
The refusal to be called “Expat,” is part of a new way of interpreting migration, not as an abandonment of things, people and places, but as a push to “go towards,” without being guided by excessive enthusiasm, but using the fear of uncertainty as a lever to welcome positive potential.
Image generated by the artificial intelligence system Bing Image Creator.
Simona explains it to us like this, “I do not want to eliminate tout court the negative elements that migration has in it: loneliness, impact with different cultures, especially when driven by necessity and emergency, that is, when migrant people have no other alternative to leaving.”
A migratory flow of young Italians in the new millennium, says a study by Fondazione Nord-Est, is comparable to that of the 1950s, in this case, however, it consists of 30 percent of people with college degrees, while in the postwar period the majority of those who left had not even obtained an elementary school diploma. Simona and other young people with diplomas and degrees leave Italy for a reason that can be summed up in one sentence: “better career opportunities.”
– Carlo Sangalli
“A migratory flow of young Italians in the new millennium, says a study by Fondazione Nord-Est, is comparable to that of the 1950s, in this case, however, it consists of 30 percent of people with college degrees, while in the postwar period the majority of those who left had not even obtained an elementary school diploma.”