Portuguese emigrants have not only left to escape unemployment, seeing no future in their home country, but also were in search of professional development, often taking jobs at the same low salary as in Portugal, but with the prospect of ongoing professional training.
A conference today, hosted by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, brought together researchers and sociologists of various nationalities to determine why people had left Portugal in such numbers and what they had done for work after they landed.
For those Portuguese that headed to the UK, just 26% of respondents were unemployed when they left Portugal. The rest already had jobs in Portugal but wanted ones with better prospects in a less moribund economy.
José Carlos Marques from the Migration Studies Centre pointed out that 72% of Portuguese immigrants now in the UK already had a higher education diploma.
Georges Lemaitre of the OECD said that there are many who took jobs at the same salary and Marques added that continued professional development had been a major objective.
Lemaitre pointed out that, despite the strong increase in emigration in skilled Portuguese workers, the outflow was dominated still by those with a low skill set.
An earlier study by Rui Machado Gomes, a professor at the University of Coimbra, revealed that half of those who have left for other European countries will not be returning.
The search for employment and better rates of pay was given as the reason by 80.7% of respondents in the Coimbra research.
An estimated 110,000 Portuguese left the country last year, the second consecutive year that around 9,000 people a month have decided to seek their fortune in greener, and often damper pastures.
