open forum
A country’s ability to generate talent and, perhaps more importantly, to retain it, is the foundation for consolidating a prosperous future of well-being and social and economic development. But today, we are very far from this reality.
For more than 15 years, Spain has been suffering from an alarming trend of what we already know as the ‘brain drain’. Our young graduates and many professionals with extensive experience are increasingly escaping from an increasingly suffocating fiscal environment and from job offers with salaries that do not correspond to the academic and experiential effort acquired, creating great frustration and a financial imbalance that causes the mass exodus of highly qualified people. This situation also entails the paradox that workers without higher education can achieve better salary levels than someone who has invested more than 6 years in university training creating a middle class that penalizes university meritocracy and continues to face salary inequalities due to gender or birth. Without going any further, according to the latest data extracted from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) and the European Commission last year, European countries such as Slovenia, Ireland or France maintain salary levels well above those received in our country or, as in the case of Luxembourg, where this figure is doubled. We also continue to have a 9.4 percent gender pay gap, although it has narrowed considerably over the past decade.
Since the 2008 crisis, this situation has worsened and, today, almost 3 million Spaniards have decided to start a new life outside our borders and approximately 90 percent have done so to improve their working conditions or find employment in other countries. While our researchers, scientists, doctors, and engineers are leaving, we still lack qualified professionals here. According to a report by the Bank of Spain and the Spanish Confederation of Business Organisations (CEOE), approximately 109,000 qualified professional positions remain vacant due to lacking workers with the appropriate skills and training. This deficit affects key sectors such as technology, engineering, health, and education, but, specifically, the figures in the health sector are staggering, as the need to cover 60,000 professionals by 2030 is reached.
This national emigration is not compensated by the foreign immigration that we accept and that represents 17 percent of all of Europe. More than 50 percent of this group works as unskilled or low-skilled workers in sectors such as construction, domestic service, or agriculture, being unable to fill the gap left by our qualified Spaniards who leave. This mismatch between the departure of talent and the arrival of less-skilled labor generates a loss in terms of human capital that represents, in turn, a loss in the quality and excellence of the country’s economic competitiveness, innovation, and sustainable development.
Europe and, of course, Spain need to address this issue with the depth and seriousness it deserves and initiate measures that encourage the retention of our talent and the arrival of a regulated and balanced immigration that meets the needs of the professional profiles we need. In this way, we will truly be helping those families who leave their homes to choose our country as a permanent residence and we will build a more just and equitable society. A place where we can prosper and collaborate in the collaborative growth of the wealth and excellence of our country. We will ensure a better future for our children where the hope of prosperity is achieved among us and where their international experiences are by choice and not by obligation.
Welcoming illegal immigrants without resources and without a clear policy of penalizing those countries that allow these massacres to occur will be the death and decline of a Europe that no longer has the strength or courage to raise the flag of the values that have always distinguished us as a Union and that could make the difference in the face of the economic explosion and growth of other countries such as China or the USA. Being European is something else.
Aerial view of Barcelona
