MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

587,000 Argentine live overseas

According to a survey from the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 587,000 Argentines reside permanently overseas. Of this number, 220,845 are officially registered in Argentine consulates, while the rest, 366,000 not registered, is an estimate of the different consular offices.

As impressive as this number might be it's hard to establish a tendency since the last scientific paper on Argentine Migratory Dynamics is dated in 1985 and covers 1955-1984, a period of much political turmoil that ends with the restoration of democracy. In that period it was possible to determine that two thirds of Argentines residing in the United States had more than the years of education, that is a highly qualified migration.

One of the demographic experts that worked in the 1955/84 report and currently working in Santiago de Chile, Susana Schkolnik believes this is still the prevailing tendency. "Educated people have more contacts, it gives them greater mobility, besides the fact that the highly educated can also perform menial jobs so their range of work possibilities is greater", said Ms. Schkolnik.

The exodus of highly qualified Argentines is believed to have began in the sixties, with a great boost during the rule of former military dictator General Juan Carlos Onganía in 1966. In July 1966 Onganía sent troops into university compounds ("searching for communists") and thousands of Argentine scientists and academics left the country for the developed world in search of better working conditions and lesser political pressures. It was the beginning of what is known as the "brain drain". A symbol of that period is Dr. Cesar Milstein who left for England and twenty years later obtained a Nobel Prize in Medicine, says Lelio Marmora a migration expert from Buenos Aires University.

Between 1976 and 1983 another 30,000 qualified Argentines were forced into exile by the notoriously bloody military Juntas, and even if some returned with the recovery of democracy they left a network of contacts in Europe and North America. In the late eighties and early nineties in the midst of hyperinflation and job instability during the transition period of Presidents Raúl Alfonsín and Carlos Menem, it is estimated 30,000 Argentines left in search of a better future, according to Mr. Marmora.

The latest wave of emigrants is defined as rather "chaotic and desperate", and responds to people who between 2000 and 2002 lost their jobs in Argentina and leave mainly for the countries of their ancestors in Europe, not necessarily with the same level of education as previous Argentine emigrants. Although there are no official numbers, it is estimated 140,000 emigrated during this last crisis.

Mr. Marmora compares these numbers with the recorded 10 million European immigrants that arrived in Argentina between 1860 and 1930, plus another 3 million after Second World War. Of the first group over half remained in Argentina while from the second, three out of four returned to their countries of origin.However Mr. Marmora points out that for each Argentine in Spain there are ten Spaniards in Argentina and for each Argentine in Italy, twenty Italians in Argentina.