Generation in exile

You go to school, grow up, maybe travel a bit and grad­u­ate. Then, it's time to find a job and forge a ca­reer, meet some­one, set­tle down, start a fam­ily and con­tinue work­ing to pay the bills. For young peo­ple, the path is clearly laid out and it seems rel­a­tively sim­ple. But what if you don't like study­ing? What if you can't find a job? Or what if you don't want to raise a fam­ily? Per­haps it is not so sim­ple, after all.

This is par­tic­u­larly true today, mired in an on­go­ing eco­nomic cri­sis that has hit the job prospects of young peo­ple hard. Given the cur­rent cir­cum­stances many young peo­ple have been forced to think out­side the box and con­sider al­ter­na­tives to the tra­di­tional lifestyle. Among the op­tions taken up by many young Cata­lans is to go abroad, as Na­dine Rutow, of the Ofic­ina de Joven­tut i Habi­tatge, ex­plains. She says that “above all since 2012” the num­ber of young Cata­lans leav­ing the coun­try for fi­nan­cial rea­sons has risen sharply: “Leav­ing has be­come a ne­ces­sity,” she says.

Spokesper­son for the UGT's Avalot-Joves, Afra Blanco, re­cently pre­sented her or­gan­i­sa­tion's lat­est re­port on the mat­ter: Joves mes a mes 2014. The aim of the doc­u­ment is to check the state's claims that we are start­ing to emerge from the cri­sis and how well Cat­alo­nia's re­cov­ery is going. Blanco says the re­port shows that “the most com­mon tem­po­rary con­tract in Cat­alo­nia is for days, the most un­sta­ble of all.”

With this in mind, Avalot claims that it is im­pos­si­ble for young peo­ple “to de­velop their life pro­ject”, a process that re­quires “the ca­pac­ity to train and de­velop and enter the job mar­ket in a sta­ble and dig­ni­fied man­ner”, with the aim of at­tain­ing in­de­pen­dence from their fam­i­lies. As a re­sult, says Blanco, “Cat­alo­nia has been un­able to offer at­trac­tive, dig­ni­fied and sta­ble jobs”, so that many “per­fectly well-ed­u­cated” young peo­ple have cho­sen to leave.

The lat­est Idescat fig­ures on youth em­i­gra­tion, based on the reg­istry of for­eign res­i­dents, say the num­ber of Cata­lans liv­ing abroad was 221,444 in 2014. Of these, 55,319 were be­tween 15 and 34. Be­tween 2009 and 2014, the num­ber of young Cata­lans res­i­dent abroad rose by 19,772.

San­dra Fachelli is a re­searcher at the Grup de Re­cerca en Ed­u­cació i Tre­ball at the UAB, which spe­cialises in the sit­u­a­tion of uni­ver­sity grad­u­ates. Analysing the lat­est re­port from the Agència per a la Qual­i­tat del Sis­tema Ed­u­catiu (AQU), car­ried out in the first quar­ter of 2014, she says that grad­u­ate un­em­ploy­ment is lower than that of other young peo­ple with­out such a high level of stud­ies, and the gap is grow­ing. Ac­cord­ing to the AQU study, of a total 15,556 grad­u­ates from pub­lic Cata­lan uni­ver­si­ties, some 3% work abroad.