| Canmak |
The Brain-drain continues
CANADA REMAINS A PROMISE LAND FOR THE MACEDONIANS
“I have spent 8000 Euro until I graduated from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, and I now have a salary of 200 Euro. I want to go to Canada. I think that there I would get a financial satisfaction for all my investments and the capacities I built” - says the 26-years old Andrijana Janeva.
Of similar thinking are most of the two hundred young people that, at the end of May, in the packed hall in the Skopje hotel Holiday Inn, attended the lecture of the Canadian attorney of migration rights, Mendel Green. He presented the legislative changes that provide for easier entry of people with high education into Canada. According to the new legislation, additional points are awarded to the applicants for Canadian immigration visa who have high education and speak several languages.
In this way, Canada fills the intellectual lack of educated and able to work people, with “ready-made” personnel from abroad. It also improves the demographic structure of the country, since with the “import” of personnel overcomes the negative natality rate.
In the Canadian Embassy in Skopje they say that about 3600 Macedonians a year are applying for a visa. It is expected that this number will increase after 28th of June this year, when the application of the more liberal conditions for entry into Canada starts.
The example of Andrijana Janeva shows that for the young Macedonians, with a university diploma in their pocket, it gets ever easier to decide to go as gastarbeiters to foreign countries, because of the expected better living standard and more money. In Macedonia there are more than 370 000 unemployed, out of which about 19 000 are with an university diploma.
Nobody in this country maintains statistics on the number of emigrated Macedonians and therefore it is not known how many of our compatriots are dispersed throughout the world. According to the estimations of the Agency for Emigration, between the year 1990 and the present, more than 65 000 people moved from the state.
Slavica Indzevska, from the Foundation Open Society Institute Macedonia, who works on the Brain Drain campaign thinks that the level of departures of the Macedonian people with university education is distressing. “The Government sector, business sector and, in general, all the institutions must implement a strategy to prevent the emigration due to the guest for better life of young professional personnel with a university degree. I respect the wishes and the choice of these people that for the tomorrow to be better, one has to leave, but still we should responsibly work to stop this trend, by which the state looses the young people of a great intellectual potential”, says Indzevska.
The phenomenon “Leaving for Canada” is present in the country for quite some time. A large number of families grasped at the opportunity to work in unpopulated regions Manitoba and Saskatchewan, that the Canadian government wants to populate with as many immigrants as possible. “In Macedonia I haven’t received a salary for over a year and I decided to use the opportunity for work in Canada, where I can even make savings now” - says Ljube Petrovski, a Macedonian who is temporarily employed in the Canadian town of Toronto. “My son is a student of electrical engineering and after he graduates I will probably take him to Toronto as well. What is offered to him in Macedonia in terms of salary and working conditions is null, compared to what the child can have here in Canada”, explains Ljube Petrovski.
His son, Vladimir Petrovski agrees that the Canadian residence is a better life option. “I have enough reasons to go there. My father worked, but did not bring home any money. The strikes to get a salary are more and more frequent, and unemployed people are impossible to count. It is obvious that the diploma here won’t be of much worth”, says Vladimir Petrovski.
In Macedonia there is not a single state competent institution that works on registering of highly educated people who have left the country. In our state nobody has initiated a strategy to attract the young intellectual forces who are studying or working abroad.
Only the Open Society Institute Macedonia, with its newest project entitled Brain Drain implements project to attract and support our professionals from abroad to return to Macedonia.
The projects are an effort to stimulate the competent bodies to start maintaining efficient records on the people with university education who have left Macedonia.
The project envisages inspiring of the competent bodies to develop a strategy to return the intellectual potential from abroad to Macedonia. Planned is establishment of an information network that will be related to the degree of education, professional capabilities and professional experiences of the young Macedonians abroad.
|