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Homeland Ties. A Starting Point For New Receiving Strategies? The
Case Of Romanians In Turin, Italy
SCHROOT Tanja1, SURNAME Name2
1 Università degli studi di Torino (ITALY) tanja.schroot@unito.it
Abstract
In order to understand how social capital works explicitly on issues related to positive perception of life quality within the communities of high-skilled migrants, it is crucial to examine how they are established, what the priorities of its members of affiliation are and which benefits are retrieved. This is where a current research ties in, that focuses on high-qualified immigrants from Romania who are currently living in the province of Turin, Italy.
Keywords: migration, highly qualified immigrants, Romanian diaspora, Italy
The European skill hub
The expansion of the Union towards Central and Eastern Europe and the progressing globalizing dynamics re-defined roles and relations of all adherent states on the one hand side and triggered decisively the national morphology of each member on the other.
Favell and Recchi (2009:1) call it a “unique economic, political, legal and social experiment in transnational regional integration”, where mobility became a new meaning. Migration as a common and frequent practice differed decisively from former patterns and represented completely new life trajectories to a large part of the European population.
Several EU countries have been facing the emigration waves of qualified, talented or even highly-skilled professionals who were educated and specialized in the native country and co-financed by public funds1. In this regard the terms brain drain and brain gain have been coined as the driving forces of firstly public and academic debates and secondly a quite significant number of measures on local, regional and national level to refer to the mismatch between talent in- and outflow in the country of origin and destination. (Salt 1997, Gill 2005)
In Italy this thematic has been studied particularly in the field of research and development to measure the effects on societies. Maria Carolina Brandi (et al 2003, 2009, 2010, 2014), responsible for several conducted studies on behalf of the National Research Committee in Italy (CNR), refers to a lack of job and career opportunities in public research institutions, universities and companies as one of the main driver for labor emigration of Italian scientists.
Other peers who did extensive research on the situation of scientific brain drain in Italy, highlight the noteworthy imbalance between incoming and outgoing high-skilled migration and accordingly the net loss of knowledge (Gill 2005:319f.)2, partly caused by mobility schemes introduced and 1 According to data provided by Eurostat from 2015 Germany had the highest quota o emigrants with 347.200 persons, followed by Spain (343.900), Great Britain (299.200) , France (298.000) and Poland (258.800)
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statisticsexplained/index.php/Migration_and_migrant_population_statistics#Migration_f ows
financed by the European Union, as the Marie Curie initiative3. Proposals for solution made by scientists and politicians include a change of perspective towards possibilities for brain gain, where migration is envisaged an opportunity instead of a thread or “zero-sum game” (Ackers 2008:2).
Accordingly, long-term strategies that aim for a win-win situation for both countries should be pursued; high-qualified migrants who emigrate from their country of origin could implement know-how, capital, networks etc. through transnational activities or by return migration.
To this end, several initiatives to promote and facilitate return migration have been undertaken. So did for instance Italy launch the programme “Rientro dei cervelli” in 2001 and directed a total of 80 billion of Italian Lire to the provision of contracts with a duration to up to 36 months for Italian scientists. Subsequent incentives included further investments for the same purpose and tax benefits. However, the results were disappointing: less than 500 researchers in 9 years returned to Italy. (Brandi 2014)
This is one of the outcomes that quarry ‘lurid medial reconstructions’, as Beltrame (2007:60) calls them in his work on reality and myths of brain drain in Italy. He sustains based on ISTAT data and studies of Docquier and Marfouk [2006] that the ‘Italian problem’ is however not the emigration of Italian’s professional ‘elite’ but the scarce capacity of attracting high-qualified immigrants. The journalist Raffaele Nappi backs that view referring to Italy as the “world’s black sheep” when it comes to attracting foreign talent ( https://www.west-info.eu/for-attracting-foreign-talent-italy-is-worlds-black-sheep/). Also, international rankings as the Global Talent Competitiveness Index 2018 (https://adeccogroup.it/valore-al-lavoro/futuro-del-lavoro/global-talent-competitiveness-index-2018/ )
confirm Italy’s lower position within the global range of countries that attract most talents, and put them on them on 36th position, after Lithuania (34th) and Costa Rica (35th).
In an international comparison of measures and initiatives implemented to offer inspiring options for the high-skilled, Beltrame prompts to change perspective and to focus on the qualified incomings instead of outgoings, and thus on the utilization of skills and not on its production.
In fact, recent scholarship and public stakeholders in Italy emphasize the flight and abundance of Italian brains, when tackling the brain discussion. However empirical evidence on migration patterns of Italians, that reveal significant clashes between effective emigrants and eventual returnees, should suggest a paradigm shift from a narrow nationalistic consideration of brains to a wider assumption that goes along with the European ideals promoted for several decades now. Therefore, knowledge and competence drain should not consider only Italian brains who leave the home context to sell their talent abroad, but also potential brains from a European context, who stayed in Italy but intend or actually are directed to other EU-countries with more favorable conditions. The sum of them should consequently be considered to be compensated by incoming skills that can contribute to economic growth and cultural diversity. To stimulate development of these kind valorization strategies must be pointed on the actual needs and aspirations of foreign skilled labour force, willing to come or to stay in Italy.
Breinbauer (2007:23) reminds us in this context that local and national decision makers cannot design appropriate measures to attract brains of quality rather than quantity, if the research continues to lack crucial empirical evidence on “what actually happens with the Brains” and if regional and national differences between the sending contexts are not taken into consideration.
Research questions must thus address motivational priority definition and setting along the migratory trajectory, which is likely to change over time, to improve and work towards the most common mobility objective: to enhance life quality.
2 Gill utilizes figures in her study that show the mismatch of incoming and outgoing researchers in Italy in the 1990s: while 2.3% of Italians worked abroad 0.3% of non-Italian had an employment in Italy. (Gill 2005: 323f)
3 Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions and funding address researchers of several disciplines and at all stages of their career and potential collaborations between industry and academia to foster employability and career development in Europe. Retrieved on 01/10/2019 on:
Most of the issues that are essential for life quality and integration in the new context can be either favoured or optimized through one mediating driving force, and that is social capital in the
destination country. In accordance with Bourdieu’s (1983) definition, social capital is hence settled in diverse milieus of the immigrant’s daily life and relies on their member’s affiliation.
Consequently, its total establishes the relational network of the migrant in the receiving context. Sociology has a long-standing research tradition with social networks and since Mark
Granovetter’s (1973) pioneering work on the dimensions of strong and weak ties, their nature and impact on life circumstances continue their relevance in contemporary social studies.
Romanian skills in Italy
In order to understand how social capital works explicitly on issues related to positive perception of life quality within the communities of high-skilled migrants, it is crucial to examine how they are established, what the priorities of its members of affiliation are and which benefits are retrieved. Romanians represent by far the most prominent group of European immigrants in Italy, whereas Turin reveals one of the highest concentrations in the country. With reference to data from the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) 99.714 Romanians in 2019 made up 44.9% of the total foreign population in Turin Province (
https://www.tuttitalia.it/piemonte/provincia-di-torino/statistiche/cittadini-stranieri-2019/ ) . Due to previous studies, in 2012 only 11% of Romanian men and 20% of their female counterparts had jobs in Italy, which belong to the category ‘medium and high-skilled’ category (Mara 2012:40). This lays the ground for several presumptions: the skill ratio of Romanian immigrants is either lower than in other migrant groups, there is a lack in job matching with imported skills in several employment sectors, highly skilled Romanians focus on other geographical regions in Europe. In Italy, they outnumber however various other high-skilled immigrant groups due to the size of their communities.
Romania became one of the latest EU-members in 2007, even though there had been massive emigration flows in the post-1989 period, immigration to Italy further intensified after the access to the Union.
Homeland ‘ties’ the new base
The study participants were asked if and how they established contacts with other (high-qualified and not) Romanians in the host context to examine the social dynamics within distinctive communities and the applied mechanisms and strategies among its members.
All interviewees stated that they had mainly developed their social network through their involvement in associations, both as a member or a founder, and in church.
Most Romanian associations in Italy pursue transnational activities that are partly sustained financially by the Romanian government. In fact, the ‘Ministry for Romanians abroad’ had been created in 2017 on purpose to deal with social and cultural aspects of the diaspora. The branch of the Romanian government provides funds and initiatives for its diaspora worldwide. Thereby it follows the overall objective to promote the Romanian identity abroad and in particular to stimulate return migration, as the country is facing a stark lack on labour forces due to the massive emigration flows occurred in the last two decades. Efforts are put increasingly in the preservation of the Romanian language to connect those who decided to leave, either temporary or on a long-term scale, to their home country and thus to facilitate the integration upon a potential return (Information retrieved from an interview with Officials of the Ministry for Romanians abroad, conducted by the author on September 25th 2019).
Consequently, associations founded by Romanians in the destination country do apply for funding to initiate and promote innovative and promising projects devoted to the preservation of Romanian language, culture and identity. However, the missing financial assistance on local level and beyond the project lifetime granted by the Romanian Ministry often impedes a long-time running of the
activities or the associations. An issue that was broached repeatedly by the interviewees was the lack of physical space and facilities, of expertise and funds for dissemination and sustainability actions. Taking into consideration that:
- Romanians are currently the most prominent foreign community in Italy, being in one of the first destination countries for the Romanian diaspora on European level
- migration flows are fluctuating within the different regions of Italy, whereas the regions of Lazio (Rome), Lombardy (Milan) and Piedmont (Turin) reveal according to ISTAT data the most
significant Romanian diasporas in numbers ( https://www.tuttitalia.it/statistiche/cittadini-stranieri/romania/ )
- that there is a significant skill mismatch according to the quite low numbers of workers in qualified and highly-qualified occupational fields
- that social bonding through organized networks is a common practice to build social networks and to maintain the Romanian tradition and culture
potential receiving strategies could jump on this bandwagon and measures to attract foreign cultural capital should be tailored accordingly.
It must be questioned and discussed which role local authorities (can) play within this process, who can benefit from clustered and mixed networking and how to strengthen ties especially among high-skilled workers in the host context in order attract more of them.
Study participants further revealed that the transmission of cultural heritage of their country of origin to their offspring was highly important to them, no matter if the emigration from Romania took place before or after they were born. A continuous contact with family back in Romania, the cultivation of traditional and cultural practices and family communications in Romanian or even local dialect are commonly mentioned strategies to maintain the ties with the homeland, to link two realities and the members of both communities.
CONCLUSION: Cultural bonding towards potential brain circulation
In line with a paradigm change towards the circulation of brains, a pronounced attention on socio-political level towards cultural bonding with the country of origin implies benefits for both, the sending and receiving setting: improved conditions for integration are attractive for foreign potential and mobile labour force that will be increasingly required to fill in occupational gaps. This accounts also for the demand triggered by foreigners who invested in the destination countries and built up their own business, as it is increasingly the case of Romanians in Italy.
On the other hand, intensive ties with the origin culture and the cultivation of the mother tongue over more generations renders return migration a potential option and facilitates a reinsertion in the context of origin.
Consequently, a scenario with circulating cultural capital is conceivable if conditions in the host context are in coherence with endeavours of the origin context. To promote the maintenance and cultivation of cultural and linguistic roots and provide the conditions for it should be therefore part of attraction and valorisation strategies in Italy. At the same time, endeavours to keep emigrants
attached to their homeland as exemplified and promoted by the Romanian government, promise a facilitated reconnection of potential returnees of first- or second-generation migrants.
REFERENCES [Times New Roman, 12-point, bold, left alignment]
Bourdieu, P. (1983). ÖÖkonomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital, soziales Kapital. In: KRECKEL, Reinhard: Soziale Ungleichheiten (Soziale Welt Sonderband 2). Ötto Schwarz & CÖ
The Strength of Weak Ties Author(s): Mark S. Granovetter Source: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, No. 6 (May, 1973), pp. 1360-1380 Published by: The University of Chicago Press
