In the autumn of 2018, I moved to Lisbon for a month-long course at the Universidade de Lisboa. I struggled to find any short-term sublets in the city, so the university stepped in to offer me a shared room in an all-male dormitory in an upmarket neighbourhood. I was surrounded by young, highly educated Portuguese students who all agreed upon one thing: after graduating, they would be leaving the country.
Now the coalition government, the centre-right Aliança Democrática, is using this year’s budget to try to stem this brain drain and keep young graduates in Portugal. The proposed policy is a progressive, multi-year tax holiday for those aged 18 to 35 on annual salaries of up to €28,000 (£23,360). But is this the right approach?
Emigration is a huge issue that must be addressed by the country: roughly 30% of young people born in Portugal now live and work abroad, representing the highest emigration rate in Europe.
My own family history is captured in this statistic: my mum and my four grandparents emigrated to Canada from Portugal in an era when there were severely limited educational opportunities for them (a third of the population was illiterate in 1960, the year of my mother’s birth). The current wave........