Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2010, at the height of Spain’s economic crisis. The claim that Germany has completely emerged from the crisis reflects the situation at that time.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Germany gave Spaniards the opportunity to work at a time when jobs and the economy had not yet taken off in Spain. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, times have changed, and according to official studies we now have a generation of young people who are better prepared than ever, both professionally and academically.
For more than seven years, we were the preferred destination for people from dozens of countries who came to live and work here. We took in immigrants and gave them jobs and opportunities to start businesses just as if they were Spanish, but 40 years later, we are back in the 1970s.
Germany is once again opening its doors to Spaniards looking for decent, well-paid work, something that is hard to come by in Spain today for a recent university graduate. History repeats itself, and thousands of Spanish students will follow in the footsteps their parents took half a century ago.
Germany has announced that it will need 500,000 foreign workers every year. An enviable offer, considering that Germany has completely emerged from the crisis. During the boom years, Spain failed to diversify its future and bet everything on construction and tourism.
Now our nurses and doctors are finding job offers in Italy, and our best economists in the United States. Let’s just hope our professionals can soon come back home and work in their own country, and that Spain has learned its lesson: even though we play with an advantage, once our degree is finished we “once again” end up at a disadvantage.
Further reading
Featured image: Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F008013-0003 / Unterberg, Rolf / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
