Why do we never talk about young people who stay in italy? È così facile fare rage-bait sulla questione della fuga dei cervelli

Will recently published an Instagram post titled «Italy continues to be a country people leave». The content is fairly self-explanatory, with the usual infographic highlighting that, according to an Italiani nel Mondo report, over the past 20 years, 1.6 million Italians have chosen to migrate, and only 827 thousand have returned.

Same story, different day, since when it comes to the brain drain narrative, the media have been obsessively stressing for decades how the situation keeps getting worse and how Italian under-30s would supposedly rather land in remote lands than stay at home. The main issue with Will’s argument, as with the broader public discourse, is that the claim about Italian migration is essentially framed as brain drain = everyone is escaping. A narrative that works well in the media, but one that erases everything else — or rather, everyone else.

Young Italians leave, but many also return

Youth mobility is far more complex than a one-way flow. It is not the exodus it is often described as, but an ecosystem, and when the topic is addressed, no one ever mentions the numbers related to returns. According to the latest ISTAT report on international migration, in 2024 around 53,000 Italians returned to the country after spending time abroad, while in the 2023–2024 biennium, there were over 270,000 departures. The balance is still negative, of course, but it shows that not all young people who leave do so permanently. In the previous five-year period, for instance, within the 25–34 age group, there were 192,000 departures and 73,000 returns, equating to almost one in three choosing to return after an experience abroad.

There is also another segment that completely escapes official statistics: young people who studied abroad without transferring their residency, and therefore do not appear in either departure or return data. A group that is numerically difficult to quantify, yet strongly present, especially in the last 10 years. Master’s degrees in the United Kingdom, graduate programmes in the Netherlands, and Erasmus periods turned into international CVs. ISTAT does not record these individuals because they do not involve an administrative migration and therefore never appear in brain drain numbers. Nevertheless, they are part of a slice of the population that rarely finds space in the media narrative, because it does not fit the moral panic of «there are no young people left in Italy».

And what about Italians who stay in Italy?

Strange but true, yet in this debate, the least-mentioned category is that of all the young people who are born in Italy, grow up in Italy, and remain in Italy. Perhaps because it is not convenient, or perhaps because there is always a thin (not so thin) layer of elitism. Even if no one says it openly, those who leave are treated as heroes. The brain drain is portrayed as the exodus of the brightest, those who made it, whereas those who stay are seen as inferior, part of a supposedly less valuable human capital.

Reality, however, looks quite different: according to ISTAT, each year only a minority of young Italians emigrate — roughly 150,000 total departures, of which less than half are under 35. In the 25–34 age group, the most mobile and exposed to the brain drain narrative, the ratio between those who leave and those who stay remains extremely unbalanced: over 95% of young Italians live in Italy permanently. It is an enormous figure, yet one that nobody ever mentions because it contradicts the idea of an empty, abandoned country.

The same goes for students. Every year, according to MIUR–Eurostat estimates, around 36,000 Italian students go abroad to study, but they represent only a fraction of the nearly 2.8 million students enrolled in Italian universities. And despite the narrative of Erasmus being a launchpad towards permanent emigration, the vast majority, according to Eurydice and AlmaLaurea, eventually return and remain in Italy after graduation, often for family reasons, economic factors, or a sense of territorial belonging.

The right not to emigrate

And so the real question becomes: why do we always talk only about those who leave, and never about those who stay? Why do we attribute heroism to those who emigrate, and never to those who choose to build something here, often in conditions that are more difficult, slower, and more frustrating? For those with a strong academic inclination, as well as those who enter the workforce straight away, the refrain is always the same: «you’re wasted on Italy, you need to go abroad». As if emigrating were not one possibility among many, but a moral obligation, a necessary step toward self-realisation.

This is precisely where a deeper perspective becomes necessary, one capable of moving beyond the binary rhetoric of escape or failure. As philosopher and professor Andrea Zhok reminds us in his Critique of Liberal Reason, our idea of the individual is often built on a flawed premise — that of a detached human being, uprooted from context and free to choose in abstract what is best for themselves. But, as the anthropologists of the American Anthropological Association argued in their critique of the individualistic conception of human rights in the Universal Declaration, no individual can truly be separated from the cultural frameworks that shape them. Speaking of pure freedom ignores the fact that roots, relationships, social networks, and material conditions shape every choice. In other words, it risks imposing a worldview based primarily on Western liberal values, while human reality is far more complex.

The same is true for migration rhetoric. In 2016, the journal Studi Emigrazione dedicated an entire issue to The Right Not to Emigrate, reminding us that in many parts of the world emigration is not a choice but a necessity: the outcome of economies without alternatives, governments that fail to invest in younger generations, and an entire migration industry that profits from the forced movement of people. Applying this lens to Italy means recognising a fundamental principle: the right not to emigrate is invisible. Invisible because it is not newsworthy, invisible because it does not fit the myth of success, invisible because those who stay do not embody the narrative of exportable human capital. And this is precisely why no one talks about the young people who remain in Italy.