Italians see chance to reverse brain drain amid pandemic

PALERMO, Italy — When Lombardy registered Italy’s first coronavirus case in February last year, Paolo Piacenti didn’t think twice about accepting his company’s offer to work remotely and swap Milan for his native Sicily.

“There are better job opportunities in Milan than in Sicily, you can’t deny that,” Piacenti, a management engineer, said. “But I had always dreamt of coming back. I just never had a concrete chance.”

For Piacenti and thousands of others, the pandemic became that chance. One study late last year found that since the beginning of the outbreak, at least 45,000 Italians had returned from the country’s wealthy north to central and southern regions. Other estimates, which also looked at Italians returning from other countries, put the number as high as 100,000.

The phenomenon is not limited to Italy. Greece, too, is hoping to tempt citizens to return amid the pandemic. Romania’s prime minister claimed in May last year that as many as 1.3 million citizens had temporarily returned home.

In the wake of the 2009 financial crash and subsequent austerity, Southern Europe saw hundreds of thousands of citizens, particularly the young and well educated, move to richer countries in search of better opportunities.

Italy alone lost 800,000 citizens to this brain drain, which is estimated to cost the country about €14 billion every year. At the same time, 2 million Italians from poorer central and southern regions moved north, exacerbating the country’s economic divide.

The pandemic and the surge in remote working it prompted could mark a turning point. The challenge facing southern governments now is how to turn these temporary relocations into permanent moves.

Grassroots effort

It’s not as if Italy hasn’t tried before. For years, NGOs like Fondazione con il Sud or government-funded initiatives like Resto al Sud (“I stay in the south”) tried to tempt young professionals to return to the disappearing villages of the south by offering incentives like tax breaks and long-distance mentoring support.

But a lack of political strategy for tackling youth unemployment, poor infrastructure and the broader lack of opportunities meant the impact of such efforts remained limited.

The pandemic is prompting a rethink. With many employees embracing the chance to return to their home regions — whether out of necessity, a desire to reconnect with their roots or the realization that they could swap congested cities for the seaside — Italy had no choice but to adjust to the new normal.

Southern Italians swiftly recognized the potential. In March last year, a group of young Sicilians founded South Working, an organization aiming to build a network of young professionals and better tech infrastructure to attract talent not just during the pandemic, but beyond.

“The idea was born during a virtual aperitivo over Zoom with other fellow Italians who had returned home during the first national lockdown,” said Elena Militello, founder and president of South Working. 

“Our idea was to transform something that seemed utopian into a concrete project that wouldn’t just tackle this return as temporary, in an emergency frame, but as an opportunity to develop the economic and cultural environment of southern regions, to make this ‘counter-exodus’ sustainable in the long-term.”

In recent months, her Palermo-based organization has built partnerships to improve the south’s infrastructure, such as transport, faster internet connection and co-working spaces, in an attempt to address the limitations deterring young professionals from settling (and spending their income) here.

Wooing digital nomads

But southern countries have realized that with the rise of remote working, they can attract non-citizens, too.

Paul Thompson, a 53-year-old designer from the United Kingdom, said he took the opportunity to escape both Brexit and gloomy lockdown weather in London to move to Palermo when Italy’s first lockdown was lifted in late spring last year. 

“Sicilians have resourcefulness and creativity running through their veins like oxygen, which is very stimulating,” he said from the sun-kissed terrace of his newly rented apartment in Palermo. He’s one of thousands of Britons who have relocated to Europe’s southern regions since March 2020; the relocation platform Move Hub has counted more than 6,700 so far.

In Greece — which also lost about 800,000 people to richer nations between 2009 and 2015 — the government has seized the opportunity to woo foreign remote workers. In December, it passed a law giving certain remote workers a 50 percent income tax discount over the next seven years.

Piacenti, the management engineer, thinks Italy needs to step up to remain attractive to foreigners as well as its own youth. “What I’m noticing is that a competition between southern European countries is about to unfold over the next few months, as the pandemic lasts longer than initially expected,” he said.

There’s been some signs of a political effort.

In December, Andrea Giarrizzo, a lawmaker for the anti-establishment 5Star Movement, wrote a draft bill to incentivize remote working in the south as a long-term lifestyle, benefiting both people and companies. 

In his proposal, he encourages all private firms to allow for remote working as a permanent option by offering a 60 percent tax break and deductibles on tech investments aimed at easing the switch to remote working for participating companies.

“Remote working doesn’t necessarily mean work from home, but also work from your place of origin, to also reunite families separated by the north-south gap,” Giarrizzo said.

Challenges

Yet for now, experts warn, that the challenges of working from the south could outweigh the benefits.

Mila Spicola, a consultant for the Italian Ministry for the South, which works to narrow the north-south divide, said the south needs to undertake deeper structural reforms to attract people willing to stay forever. 

“This return is an interesting dynamic, but needs lots of integrations to actually work,” she said. “Those who leave wealthier nations, in fact, don’t only do so for job opportunities, but also for access to high-quality services and bureaucracy.”

Spicola believes that a stronger welfare system that includes better health care services, as well as faster bureaucracy and career support to working women, especially mothers, are missing from the current discourse. 

The Italian government intends to spend a large part of EU recovery funding on addressing these challenges. But infrastructure isn’t the only issue.

Organized crime — whose presence in the south is among the top arguments against staying for young professionals — remains a significant threat as well.

Yet Giarrizzo, the lawmaker — who is from Sicily and has spent years working to halt emigration from the south — remains confident that this counter-exodus brought on by the pandemic can become a starting point.

“Maybe only a small part of those who returned will actually stay, maybe not, we cannot know yet,” he said. “But we’re making sure to seize this unexpected opportunity. It would be counterproductive to wait for everything to be in perfect shape to begin with the first step.”