When Elena Parisi, an engineer, left Italy at age 22 to seek a career in London, five years ago, she joined the wide range of talented Italians who escaped a slow job market and lack of opportunities at home to find work abroad.
But last year, when the coronavirus pandemic forced employees around the world to work from home, Parisi, like many of his compatriots, took the opportunity to really return home to Italy.
Between Zoom’s meetings and her other jobs for a recycling company in London, she took long walks on the beach near her family’s home in Palermo, Sicily, and talked about recipes at dawn with sellers in the local market.
“The quality of life is a thousand, a thousand times better here,” said Parisi, who is now in Rome.
As with so many things, the virus brought down a family phenomenon – this time, the long brain drain from Italy. How much things are changing, and how permanent these changes will be, is a source of debate in the country. But something is clearly different.
Italy, along with Romania and Poland, is among the European countries that most send workers abroad, according to European Commission data. And the proportion of Italians living abroad with a university degree is higher than that of the general population.
Taking into account the money the country spends on its education, the brain drain from Italy costs the country about 14 billion euros (about $ 17 billion) each year, according to Confindustria, the largest business association from Italy.
Italian lawmakers have long tried to attract talented workers with tax breaks, but a gloomy job market, high unemployment, a baroque bureaucracy and narrow paths to promotion have continued to attract many Italian graduates abroad.
So, the virus seemed to do what years of incentives failed.
Last year, the number of Italians aged 18 to 34 returning home increased by 20% over the previous year, according to the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The Italian government has welcomed the return of some of the best and brightest in the country as a silver lining for what has been a brutal pandemic for Italy, calling change a “great opportunity”. There is also a financial benefit, as Italians who spend more than six months in the country have to pay their taxes there.
Paola Pisano, Italy’s minister for technological innovation, said at a conference in October that Italy had a chance to benefit from the skills and innovations that returning Italians brought with them.
She also said that Italy needs to do its part to keep them there. On the one hand, the country needs “a strong, diffuse, powerful and secure internet connection,” she said, so that those who have moved abroad “can return to their country and continue working for the company they worked for. ”.
A group of Italians founded an association called Southworking to promote remote work in the less developed south of Italy, in the hope that returning professionals would devote their free time and money to improving their hometowns.
“Their ideas, their volunteering and their creativity are in the land where they live,” said Elena Militello, the association’s president, who returned from Luxembourg to Sicily.
To promote remote work, the association is creating a network of cities equipped with fast internet connections, an airport or train station nearby and at least one co-working space or library with a good Wi-Fi network.
To map them, the association received help from Carmelo Ignaccolo, a doctoral student in urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who returned home to Sicily after the coronavirus attack.
In the past few months, Ignaccolo has supervised examinations with the Mediterranean at the bottom of his Zoom canvas, taught classes near his great-grandfather’s oil press and took refuge from the heat by studying in a nearby Greek necropolis.
“I embrace 100 percent American professional life,” he said, “but I have a very Mediterranean lifestyle.”
It is not just southern Italy that is benefiting from reverse traffic.
Roberto Franzan, 26, a programmer who built a successful start-up in London before working at Google there, returned to his home in Rome in March.
“You go to the bar and you can just start a conversation with anyone,” he said. “It worked very well for me.” He said that a number of interesting startups and technology companies were emerging in Italy and that he could imagine himself investing in the country.
“This moment gave us all the time to realize that going back to the roots can be a good thing,” he said.
Italy’s business leaders have asked the government not to waste the opportunity.
“Coronavirus, the twist of the brain drain,” wrote Michel Martone, former deputy labor minister, in the Roman newspaper Il Messaggero. He urged lawmakers to find a way to retain the “extraordinary army of young people who have returned home in the face of the emergency”.
But some experts say that there are not many advantages to solidify.
Although many Italians may have returned to the Tuscan countryside or to the beaches of Sicily, their minds are still benefiting American, British, Dutch and other foreign businesses.
“Zoom is not going to solve Italy’s problems,” said Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley who focuses on work and the urban economy and is also part of the Italian brain drain.
Brunello Rosa, a London economist who is another member of the diaspora, said that returned Italians “produce an activity for a foreign entity – they create value abroad and income abroad”. He added that “the fact that they spend their salary in Italy really doesn’t make a difference.”
A more likely outcome, he said, is that the virus will lead to economic ruin and huge levels of unemployment, which will trigger another wave of emigration as soon as European countries lift their blocks.
To really solve the problem, he and others said, Italy needs to undertake a deep structural and cultural reform that simplifies bureaucracy and improves transparency, instead of relying on “people who come home because the food is worse abroad and the weather is bad “.
Mr. Ignaccolo, the MIT doctoral candidate, plans to return to the United States to pursue his academic career, and the new company that Mr. Franzan, the programmer, is launching, will be based in Delaware.
The disadvantages of working in Italy are also of concern to Parisi, who is concerned that her professional progress will be hampered in what she sees in an Italian business world that has a limited scope for younger workers. She admitted that the lack of sunshine in London was bleak and British food was bad for her skin, but said other things were also important in life.
“I am young, I am a woman and I am in a very senior position,” she said, explaining that she would return to work in London when her office was reopened.
“It was a unique opportunity. I could keep my job and live in Italy, ”she said of her time working there. “But I always knew it would be temporary.”