When Elena Parisi, an engineer, left Italy at the age of 22 to pursue a career in London five years ago she joined the large number of talented Italians who escaped from a sluggish labor market and lack of opportunities at home to find work abroad.
But in recent years, as the coronavirus pandemic has forced employees around the world to work from home, Ms. Parisi, like many of her compatriots, seized the opportunity to really go home, to Italy.
Between Zoom meetings and her other work for a recycling business in London, she took long walks on the beach near her family’s home in Palermo, Sicily, chatting with daytime recipes with retailers in the local market.
“The quality of life here is a thousand thousand times better,” said Mrs. Parisi, who is now in Rome, said.
As with so many things, the virus has the a known phenomenon – this time Italy’s years of brain drain. How many things will change and how permanent the changes will be is a source of debate in the country. But something is clearly different.
Italy, along with Romania and Poland, are among the European countries that send the most workers abroad, according to figures from the European Commission. And the proportion of Italians living abroad and having a university degree is higher than that of the general population of Italy.
Taking into account the money the country spends on their training, Italy’s brain drain costs the country about 14 billion euros (about $ 17 billion) annually, according to Confindustria, Italy’s largest business association.
Italian lawmakers have long tried to lure talented workers back with tax cuts, but a gloomy job market, high unemployment, a baroque bureaucracy and narrow opportunities to advance have led many Italian graduates to move abroad.
Then it seemed like the virus was doing what years of incentives could not do.
In the past year, the number of Italians from 18 to 34 years old has returned home by 20 percent compared to the previous year, according to the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The Italian government has welcomed the return of some of the country’s best and brightest as a silver lining to a brutal pandemic for Italy, calling the move a ‘big opportunity’. There is also a financial benefit, because Italians who spend more than six months in the country have to pay their taxes there.
Paola Pisano, the Italian Minister for Technological Innovation, said at a conference in October that Italy has a chance to benefit from the skills and innovations that returning Italians bring.
She also said Italy should do its part to keep them there. First, the country “needs a strong, diffuse, powerful and secure internet connection,” she said, so that those who have moved abroad can return to their country and continue working for the company for which they worked. ‘
One group of Italians founded an association called Southworking to promote the work of the less developed south of Italy, hoping that returning professionals would devote their free time and money to the improvement of their hometowns.
“Their ideas, their volunteering, their creativity remain in the country where they live,” said Elena Militello, the association’s president, who returned from Luxembourg to Sicily.
To promote teleworking, the association creates a network of cities equipped with high-speed internet connections, an airport or train station in the area, and at least one collaborative space or library with good WiFi.
To map them, the association received help from Carmelo Ignaccolo, a doctoral student in urbanity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had returned to Sicily after the coronavirus.
In recent months, Mr. Ignaccolo supervised the exams with the Mediterranean in the background of his Zoom screen, he taught classes near his great-grandfather’s olive press and took refuge in the heat by studying in a nearby Greek necropolis.
“I accept an American professional life 100%,” he said, “but I have a very Mediterranean lifestyle.”
It is not just the south of Italy that benefits from the reverse traffic.
Roberto Franzan, 26, a programmer who built a successful business in London before joining Google, returned to his home in Rome in March.
“You go to the bar and you can just have a conversation with whoever,” he said. “It worked very well for me.” He said that a number of interesting new ventures and technology ventures are popping up in Italy and that he can propose to invest in the country.
“This moment has given us all the time to realize that it can be a good thing to get back to your roots,” he said.
The business leaders of Italy urged the government not to waste the opportunity.
“Coronavirus, the common face of the brain drain,” wrote Michel Martone, a former deputy minister of labor, in the Roman newspaper Il Messaggero. He urged lawmakers to find a way to keep the ‘extraordinary army of young people returning home in a state of emergency’.
But some experts believe that there are not really so many benefits to solidifying.
Although many Italians may have moved to the Tuscan countryside or to the Sicilian beachfront, they are still benefiting American, British, Dutch, and other foreign enterprises.
“Zoom is not going to solve Italy’s problems,” said Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who focuses on labor and urban economics and is part of the Italian brain drain.
Brunello Rosa, an economist in London who is still a member of the diaspora, said that returning Italians “produce an activity for a foreign enterprise – they create value abroad and income abroad.” He added that “the fact that they spend their salary in Italy does not really make a difference.”
A more likely outcome, he said, is that the virus will lead to economic wreckage and high levels of unemployment, which in turn will cause a wave of emigration once European countries lift their locks.
To really address the issue, he and others said, Italy needs to undertake a profound structural and cultural reform that streamlines bureaucracy and improves transparency, rather than relying on ‘people returning home because the food is sleazy in abroad and the weather is bad. ‘
Mr. Ignaccolo, the MIT doctoral candidate, plans to return to the United States to pursue his academic career, and the new company, Mr. Franzan, the programmer, starts in Delaware.
The disadvantages of working in Italy also make her worried about Parisi, who is worried that her professional progress will be stimulated in what she sees as an Italian business world that has narrower space for younger workers. She admitted that the lack of sun in London was gloomy and British food was bad for her skin, but said that other things are important in life as well.
“I’m young, I’m a woman and I’m in a very senior position,” she said, explaining that she would return to her job in London if her office reopened.
“It was a unique opportunity. I could both keep the job and live in Italy, ” she said of her time working there. “But I always knew it would be temporary.”