2023-10-20 13:00:04
Ana Santos had promised herself not to follow her brother’s path. To never make his mother cry like he did when, that morning in September 2012, Antonio took the plane to Brazil. “She knew that he would surely never come back and, above all, that he had no choice: it was the crisis, engineers might no longer find work in Lisbon”, says the 21-year-old young woman in a soft voice. At the time, she was 10. “I was the girl who would stay in the country and never make our mother cry. »
This summer, however, she decided to pack her bags to join a biology course in London. “Since the Covid-19 crisis, I have dreamed of working in research”, she confides. But the laboratories where she would like to apply one day are all in Northern Europe or the United States. “To succeed, I had to leave. »
Monica Marques moved to Sydney, Australia, at the end of the pandemic. Where her parents had emigrated before her in the 1970s, before returning to Setubal, the small town south of Lisbon where she grew up. “I love my country and I miss it, says this 33-year-old Portuguese teacher. But a salary is barely enough to pay the bills. I wanted to give my son better opportunities for the future. »
In 2021, 60,000 Portuguese left to live abroad, or 15,000 more than in 2020, according to the latest figures from the Portuguese Emigration Observatory. After the break linked to the health crisis, departures have resumed, mainly to the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Spain and Scandinavia. “Despite the economic recovery, our young people continue to leave”laments Armindo Monteiro, the boss of the Portuguese Business Confederation.
A “structural constant in the history” of the country
Certainly, the pace is lower than that observed during the 2010 crisis, when more than 80,000 people packed their bags each year. But it remains worrying for this small, aging country of 10 million inhabitants. According to the United Nations, it is the one in Western Europe that has the most emigrants (two million people in total) in proportion to its resident population. And for good reason : “Emigration is a structural constant in its historyrecalls Victor Pereira, researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History at the New University of Lisbon. For a long time, Portugal did not have enough resources to feed its entire population. »
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