Spain's lost generation of graduates join wave of migrants in search of jobs

Image via WikipediaRising unemployment has led to an exodus of young Spaniards looking for better opportunities abroad on a scale not seen since the 1960s

In a few weeks' time Nacho Luna will pack his bags and head for London. The 25-year-old graduate from a Madrid journalism school sees no future for himself in Spain and has decided to emigrate.
"I am just one of the many young people who are forced to make this kind of decision," he said. "It's a hard thing to do, but I don't want to form part of what some are already calling the lost generation."
Luna, pictured below, is not sure how he will earn a living, but anything is better than beating uselessly on the door of Spanish companies. The one job he has had since graduating lasted a year before the company went bust.
With 20% unemployment at home, he thinks he can do better in Britain. During the last 10 years booming Spain was a magnet for immigrants, attracting 5 million foreigners. Now Spaniards are talking of a return to the mass emigration of 1960s, when 2 million left looking for jobs in northern Europe. "I only see jobs for exploited interns who earn €300 (£263) a month. That's barely enough to cover the costs of getting to work and back every day," said Luna. "Opportunities are scarce in a country with youth unemployment over 40%."
Luna is not alone. The number of Spaniards living outside the country has increased by 20% over three years as unemployment among Luna's "lost generation" of young workers has climbed to 43%.
When Der Spiegel reported that a Madrid visit by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, last month would produce an offer of jobs for Spaniards, language schools saw a leap in applicants for German courses. "There was a sudden flood," said Matilde Ferrolasa of Madrid's Tandem school.
Exact numbers of those who have already left are hard to work out. An extra 100,000 Spaniards signed on at consulates abroad in 2010, but many more will have travelled without bothering to register.
Geologist Ignacio Zafra packed his bags in January after finding himself, aged 34, living at home with his parents in Madrid again. He lost his job in 2009 and, after just five job interviews in a year, decided to leave. His only offer had been a job as a door-to-door salesman, with no contract or guaranteed income.
"My unemployment benefits were stopped a few months ago, so I started thinking that emigrating was the best way to find a job that my own country won't give me," he said from his new base in Aberdeen. "I am a realist. I know that things are bad in the UK as well, but they will never be as bad as in Spain. The labour market here is much more active."
The new Spanish emigrants are travelling further than in the 1960s. The US, for example, has received more of them than France and Germany together.
María Elena Manzanares, a 29-year-old teacher and broadcaster, will be going to Canada in a few months' time. "It's going to take a couple of years for things to pick up here," she said. "I want to work and improve my skills."
Emerging economies such as Brazil and other Latin American countries are also seeing more Spaniards arriving.
The crucial difference between those leaving now and the manual labourers who sought work in German factories and Swiss restaurants in the 1960s is that today's emigrants are mostly young graduates with years of studying behind them. It is no longer clear that a degree is useful in Spain's paralysed job market. Unemployment among graduates aged 29 or under is running at 19% – almost the same as the national average for all age groups, regardless of education.
Many graduates lie about their education when applying for work, worried that they will be rejected for being overqualified. And 44% of those who find work do so at below their skills level, twice the European average, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
The contrast with booming Germany, which is short of 48,000 engineers, could not be greater.
Those graduates who have left say that, for those prepared to chase them, opportunities are far more plentiful abroad.
"Salaries, working hours, conditions and opportunities to advance in your career are far greater here," said 28-year-old Paula Mestre, who left her native Valencia five years ago and is now an IT consultant in Edinburgh.
It took her four months, with relatively poor English, to find a job – but six months later her salary had almost doubled and her company was offering her training. "They kept putting my salary up and giving me more responsibilities," she said. "Spanish companies simply don't invest in their workforce and people tend to work their whole life in one company."
Both she and her Spanish husband, a dentist, are doing far better than they would in Spain. "We're not thinking of going back. Why would I go? To join the dole queue?" she said.
Those who are not leaving, however, are the 5 million immigrants who flocked into Spain during the booming noughties, even though many have lost jobs. Spain's foreign population has, in fact, increased slightly over the past three years. "Virtually no one is going, mostly because their families are already here," confirmed Juan López Jiménez of the Cáritas charity.
Even the promise of free air tickets and financial help (in return for a pledge not to return for several years) cannot persuade them to leave.
"We only had a few hundred people come to us last year," says Xavier Bosch, head of immigration for the Catalan regional government, which runs a scheme to help some of the region's 1.2 million immigrants return home.
Immigrants are harder hit by unemployment than native Spaniards, though many may now be working in a black economy that accounts for 17% of GDP, according to the savings bank foundation Funcas. Figures show unemployment is worst among African immigrants, where it is running at 31%.
The new wave of emigration is not confined to Spain. Similar trends have been spotted in other EU countries blighted by the economic crisis, most notably Ireland and Greece.
But José García-Montalvo, an economist at the Pompeu Fabra university, says Spain is a special case "because we use our human resources so inefficiently". "People spend a lot of time working below their skills level and then, through a simple and pernicious psychological process, start lowering their expectations."
Emigrating, he admits, is a sensible option. For Luna it is the only one. "My desperation obliges me to attempt even the most unlikely things," he says.

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Why good jobs are going unfilled

Image by Cria-cow via Flickr

By David Frum, CNN Contributor

July 6, 2010 1:27 p.m. EDT

Washington (CNN) -- We're getting to the point where even good news comes wrapped in bad news.
Good news: Despite the terrible June job numbers (125,000 jobs lost as the Census finished its work), one sector continues to gain -- manufacturing.
Factories added 9,000 workers in June, for a total of 136,000 hires since December 2009.
So that's something, yes?
Maybe not. Despite millions of unemployed, despite 2 million job losses in manufacturing between the end of 2007 and the end of 2009, factory employers apparently cannot find the workers they need. Here's what the New York Times reported Friday:
"The problem, the companies say, is a mismatch between the kind of skilled workers needed and the ranks of the unemployed.
"During the recession, domestic manufacturers appear to have accelerated the long-term move toward greater automation, laying off more of their lowest-skilled workers and replacing them with cheaper labor abroad.
"Now they are looking to hire people who can operate sophisticated computerized machinery, follow complex blueprints and demonstrate higher math proficiency than was previously required of the typical assembly line worker."
It may sound like manufacturers are being too fussy. But they face a real problem.
As manufacturing work gets more taxing, manufacturers are looking at a work force that is actually becoming less literate and less skilled.
In 2007, ETS -- the people who run the country's standardized tests -- compiled a battery of scores of basic literacy conducted over the previous 15 years and arrived at a startling warning: On present trends, the country's average score on basic literacy tests will drop by 5 percent by 2030 as compared to 1992.
That's a disturbing headline. Behind the headline is even worse news.
Not everybody's scores are dropping. In fact, ETS estimates that the percentage of Americans who can read at the very highest levels will actually rise slightly by 2030 as compared to 1992 -- a special national "thank you" to all those parents who read to their kids at bedtime!
But that small rise at the top is overbalanced by a collapse of literacy at the bottom.
In 1992, 17 percent of Americans scored at the very lowest literacy level. On present trends, 27 percent of Americans will score at the very lowest level in 2030.
What's driving the deterioration? An immigration policy that favors the unskilled. Immigrants to Canada and Australia typically arrive with very high skills, including English-language competence. But the United States has taken a different course. Since 2000, the United States has received some 10 million migrants, approximately half of them illegal.
Migrants to the United States arrive with much less formal schooling than migrants to Canada and Australia and very poor English-language skills. More than 80 percent of Hispanic adult migrants to the United States score below what ETS deems a minimum level of literacy necessary for success in the U.S. labor market.
Let's put this in concrete terms. Imagine a migrant to the United States. He's hard-working, strong, energetic, determined to get ahead. He speaks almost zero English, and can barely read or write even in Spanish. He completed his last year of formal schooling at age 13 and has been working with his hands ever since.
He's an impressive, even admirable human being. Maybe he reminds some Americans of their grandfather. And had he arrived in this country in 1920, there would have been many, many jobs for him to do that would have paid him a living wage, enabling him to better himself over time -- backbreaking jobs, but jobs that did not pay too much less than what a fully literate English-speaking worker could earn.
During the debt-happy 2000s, that same worker might earn a living assembling houses or landscaping hotels and resorts. But with the Great Recession, the bottom has fallen out of his world. And even when the recession ends, we're not going to be building houses like we used to, or spending money on vacations either.
We may hope that over time the children and grandchildren of America's immigrants of the 1990s and 2000s will do better than their parents and grandparents. For now, the indicators are not good: American-born Hispanics drop out of high school at very high rates.
Over time, yes, they'll probably catch up -- by the 2060s, they'll probably be doing fine.
But over the intervening half century, we are going to face a big problem. We talk a lot about retraining workers, but we don't really know how to do it very well -- particularly workers who cannot read fluently. Our schools are not doing a brilliant job training the native-born less advantaged: even now, a half-century into the civil rights era, still one-third of black Americans read at the lowest level of literacy.
Just as we made bad decisions about physical capital in the 2000s -- overinvesting in houses, underinvesting in airports, roads, trains, and bridges -- so we also made fateful decisions about our human capital: accepting too many unskilled workers from Latin America, too few highly skilled workers from China and India.
We have been operating a human capital policy for the world of 1910, not 2010. And now the Great Recession is exposing the true costs of this malinvestment in human capital. It has wiped away the jobs that less-skilled immigrants can do, that offered them a livelihood and a future. Who knows when or if such jobs will return? Meanwhile the immigrants fitted for success in the 21st century economy were locating in Canada and Australia.
Americans do not believe in problems that cannot be quickly or easily solved. They place their faith in education and re-education. They do not like to remember that it took two and three generations for their own families to acquire the skills necessary to succeed in a technological society. They hate to imagine that their country might be less affluent, more unequal, and less globally competitive in the future because of decisions they are making now. Yet all these things are true.
We cannot predict in advance which skills precisely will be needed by the U.S. economy of a decade hence. Nor should we try, for we'll certainly guess wrong. What we can know is this: Immigrants who arrive with language and math skills, with professional or graduate degrees, will adapt better to whatever the future economy throws at them.
Even more important, their children are much more likely to find a secure footing in the ultratechnological economy of the mid-21st century. And by reducing the flow of very unskilled foreign workers into the United States, we will tighten labor supply in ways that will induce U.S. employers to recruit, train and retain the less-skilled native born, especially African-Americans -- the group hit hardest by the Great Recession of 2008-2010.
In the short term, we need policies to fight the recession. We need monetary stimulus, a cheaper dollar, and lower taxes. But none of these policies can fix the skills mismatch that occurs when an advanced industrial economy must find work for people who cannot read very well, and whose children are not reading much better.
The United States needs a human capital policy that emphasizes skilled immigration and halts unskilled immigration. It needed that policy 15 years ago, but it's not too late to start now.