Many members of my generation have children who have emigrated, or who plan to do so.
It is increasingly common for us to face the decade of our sixties and seventies with the
prospect of growing old thousands of kilometers from one or all of our descendants
, they are grandchildren or great-grandchildren, in turn, of others who also left their mark. native land.
We had to be in the middle, to be the stable and rooted link between two waves of migration.
It is a strange and painful position, because we witnessed the
high cost of dying far away
and, largely for that reason, we did not want to repeat it.
New travelers, on the other hand,
don't seem to be stopped by this fear.
The current circumstances are different, by the way.
Most of the immigrants to Argentina in the 19th and 20th centuries left never to return.
Some assumed it from the start, others kept the hope of a return that never came almost to the end.
They had been expelled by wars, by the economic asphyxiation that was its aftermath, by political dissidence.
They would experience geographical distances with no other palliative than the slow traffic of letters.
Even so, they marched against all the risks, because “those wings that we carry in secret, inside our bodies, open only when we dare to fall,” says the character of Celia in my novel
Only Leap
, who arrives in Buenos Aires from Finisterre. Galician.
Today the direction of the migratory wave has reversed
.
The recurrent Argentine crises may provide an explanation, not the only one.
The lack of relative opportunities is a motive, although, then and now, emigrants are not necessarily the poorest.
Resources (own or family) were always needed to pay for a ticket.
Regarding the educational level, that of those who leave is usually higher than that of their ancestors.
They carry a diploma under their arm that they will not always be able to validate to practice their profession on the other side, in a Europe where
the “welfare state” is not the same as it was thirty years ago and where there are other crises
.
Many want better salaries, they are looking for a more stable life, without the economic and political fluctuations that characterize us.
But the millennials who are leaving can also be digital nomads, experts in remote work, whose home
fits in a suitcase that can be transported from country to country
.
They often put off having children, or do not want to have them.
The exploration of the diversity of the world and its own possibilities, the horizon of the moment, are the immediate objectives.
We do not know
how this adventure
that we did not choose for ourselves will end.
In any case, migration has always been
one of the great drivers of History
.
At the foot of the escalators, at the Ezeiza airport, we will continue to wave our hands in a gesture of goodbye, as others of our blood raised theirs from distant ports.