I left Italy in the Summer of 2014.
I had a permanent contract, a job as an engineer, a family with a four years old kid.
What pushed me to leave my home country was actually a couple of things:
1. The strong belief, based on my preliminary studies in macroeconomics, that there was no future for Italy until the euro system was working like it was, and
2. the fact that I was witnessing a progressive worsening of the life conditions in my town, Rome, and also the job conditions.
I have already mentioned the reasons here and some of the difficulties I encountered here and here..I was sick and tired, I packed all my things and moved. I go on working for a living, my boy now speaks two languages, me and my wife are struggling to get integrated in the Netherlands, whose major obstacle is given by the language, very difficult to master. My wife has taken care of our boy very closely, because of the language. Only now we are really starting to enjoy the pleasure of living in the Netherlands. The difficulty of selling our property in Italy (due to a collapsing real estate market) had been making us stressed and nervous.
Despite all this, I am happy of the choice we have made. At that time, I was not even thinking about the crisis of emigration of people from Africa to Italy. I knew it was a problem, a huge problem, but I was focusing only on budget deficits, trade unbalance and so on. I was ignoring demography. Big mistake, as I (fortunately, this time) discovered later.
Two news from today:
1. The first from here. In a nut shell, a judge in Italy has decided that if you are late with the monthly payments of the mortgage for the house, then your house can be given to migrants ..for free. In other terms, the house does not go to the bank which sells the house in an auction, it goes to immigrants who got the status of refugees.
Now, by experience (a guy had rented an apartment below mine to a family of people coming from the East of Europe) I know what happens cases like this: first, a family arrives. You cannot know whether they are a family, you have to trust their declarations. This family will take possession of the house. After a few weeks or months their relatives or friends are going to join them. If the former owner did not pay the mortgage, for sure he was not paying the fees of the condominium either. Especially in those houses whose water pipelines are common amongst several houseowners, this leads the way to an explosion of overdue payments. The remaining homeowners will have to pay for the fees of all the condominium. Just imagine the situation of a family who wants to sell their apartment but the neighborhood is comprised by several families who come from Africa, do not speak the language, etc. the house will be almost impossible to sell, even if YOU live there. This will destroy the real estate market in Italy more than it is nowadays. And will increase the difference between the conditions of living in nice districts and the peripheries of the cities.
2. The second news from here. It says that for those wealthy people who decide to come to live in Italy to "enjoy the weather and the arts", they will have to pay someting like 100K euro per year to get the residence. You know what? to come to the Netherlands, I got the 30% tax ruling: in other terms, for 8 years I am paying less taxes than the average Dutch since they ease the immigration of engineers or doctors or people who have already a contract in the Netherlands and are recognized as highly educated personnel. In Italy, they are going to do the opposite: to tax those who decide to leave for Italy! At the same time, we give houses for free, of Italians who have spent their salaries, their working efforts, who have bought furniture etc to people who, very often, can barely read or write.
How long do you thing a country can go on like that?
