One of the least studied impacts of the sluggish growth of the last decade has been the resumption of large flows of Portuguese emigration. I say large because Portuguese emigration continued during our periods of high growth, such as the 1990s, albeit at a lower pace. However, as the Observatório da Emigração has recently pointed out, emigration has accelerated in the last few years due to the rise in unemployment and low job creation. Unfortunately, we don’t have good data on the emigration flows of the last few years, mostly because most of our emigration is to the European Union, and hence it is a lot more difficult to monitor. I hope to provide news (unfortunately bad news) on this front fairly soon. Meanwhile, while we still don’t have these data, it is worthwhile looking at the evidence already at our disposal.What are, then, the data telling us?
First, it is true that most of our emigration is still constituted by low-skilled workers (i.e. workers with primary or, at most, secondary education). This is not totally surprising, since we also know that, in spite of the improvements of the last decades, the share of these workers in the Portuguese workforce is still dominant. Why do these workers leave? Studies have shown that, similar to what happens with low-skilled migrants from other regions, Portuguese low skilled workers leave in search of better pay and higher living standards, but also due to family ties, as well as to escape from unemployment.
If the story ended here, it could be argued that there was nothing really new in the recent wave of emigration from Portugal, since in the 1960s and in the 1970s low-skilled emigration was also dominant (although the recent wave of emigration is allegedly more “temporary” in nature than in the 1960s and 1970s).
Unfortunately, the story does not end here. Thus, perhaps more surprising, it is interesting to verify that, in all the OECD, Portugal has one of the highest emigration rates of workers with a university education. Simply put, in terms of emigration of the highly skilled, no country in the OECD sends a higher percentage of its university-educated workers to foreign countries as much as we do, with the sole exception of Ireland.
