Usually, after a while, you wake up with aches and pains. The critical mass is passed and there are more and more arguments that mass migration causes many very specific problems (competition for wages and jobs with the local population in the economic recession, high integration costs, etc.). Then, inevitably, it is time to close. It is also marked by overkill and over-radical countermeasures.
There are very specific details hidden somewhere in between. One of them is described in their latest work by economists Angela Dalmonte and Tommaso Frattini of the University of Milan. It is about the problem of “brain waste”. This perhaps somewhat clumsy translation of the English term “brain waste” is, of course, a reference to the long-standing concept of brain drain. This term was also an unusual approach – it showed how much migration robs the countries of emigration of their intellectual or population potential. To speak of “brain waste” is to go a bit further. Frattini and Dalmonte show that, in many cases, the potential of migrants arriving in developed countries is simply wasted. Like a trained physicist delivering pizza on a bicycle through the streets of Paris or Berlin. Or people with experience in managing large teams relegated to the role of “bring, do, sweep”.
Today, the average percentage of people with secondary education does not differ much between those coming to Europe and those living in developed countries. According to Frattini’s data, it is approximately 32 percent for migrants and 34 percent for EU countries. The second interesting fact is that there are significant differences between EU countries in this regard. For example, only 12 percent of migrants in Italy have completed secondary education. In Poland (2022 data), the percentage of newcomers with a secondary school leaving exam is over 50 percent. This is the third highest result in Europe – after Luxembourg and Ireland – which mainly attracts people to work in large technology companies.
