When I explore the countryside of Portugal and find small remote villages, with no more than 10 or 20 elderly people and at several kilometers from the nearest town, I see quite well why the population of those places are disappearing. There is no work, there is no health care and the financial flows doesn’t pass through there. People want to go to the cities where resources are more assessable and personal development, career and finances have more chances to be better. This phenomenon at the level of the small Portuguese villages, in the countryside of Portugal seems to be a clear thing to everyone. And, if we extrapolate the phenomena to a global scale, where Portugal is a small village in this vast world?
Globalization is a reality more and more widespread, where flows of people happen in a natural way and the triggering factor has less and less importance. We cannot think that the children who are born in Portugal will get to live in Portugal. Of course, if they born in Portugal the probability that they stay is higher, but if we do not create the conditions for this to happen, the result will not be good.
Portugal has to compete with the rest of the world to ensure the best working and financial conditions to population. The world’s leading companies need to look to Portugal as an attractive location for business, but not by the low labor costs. Young people of high skills and high ambitions are leaving Portugal not by necessity, but because they need to meet their high ambitions, going to locations that are seen as attractive to business, to work and develop a career.
The high youth potential migration rate is in an upward trend in Portugal as it is increasingly reducing the attractiveness of Portugal for foreign population immigration. If the birth rate in the country increase, but young people continue to leave, seeking their ambition, Portugal will end like the small village in the countryside, alone and abandoned.