Brain drain: keep them, bring them back, attract them from the world
Italy does not lose its brains: it gives them away. And they call it fate
A people that lets its best leave and cannot choose whom to welcome is not poor in resources. It is poor in those who govern it. Our brightest minds should not be mourned: they should be held on to tooth and nail, and the fugitives called home. Alongside them, the planet’s most brilliant minds should be courted, won away from others. Some call it utopia. Elsewhere they simply call it method.
Keep them. You do not retain talent with a conference and a pat on the back, but with fertile ground: a tax system that stops mistaking it for a cash machine and does not change its mind with every budget, because uncertainty kills more than the tax rate. You retain it by rewarding merit rather than years spent in the queue: competitive appointments awarded for competence, not the right surname.
Attract them. There is no need to invent: copy those who have already won. London rolls out red carpets for talent; Canada and Australia select the doctor, the engineer by points, not chance; Switzerland pays, and asks no pointless questions. Offer those returning a real academic post and a laboratory, not applause. Bringing brains home is not charity: it is the most profitable of wagers.
Cultivate them. Italian genius is not a museum relic: it is among the most extraordinary raw materials history has known — and we are leaving it to rot. From Leonardo onwards it runs in our blood; yet we spend less than the European average on research, then express surprise when ideas are born elsewhere.
Choose. Because a serious nation does not submit to immigration: it governs it. It chooses whom to welcome — for what they can do and the laws they are ready to respect — and shows the door to those who trample those laws or have no right to remain. Entrusting your threshold to the moods of the currents, or the agendas of people-smugglers, is not generosity: it is surrendering sovereignty. This is not cruelty — it is a state’s dignity. The courage we lack is not to hate anyone: it is to enforce the law without trembling. All this is known — in Shanghai, Boston, London. For decades we have trained, at everyone’s expense, the best we then package for our competitors. We sell off the family gold and fail even to guard our own front door. Those governing Italy, and that Europe which lectures us from velvet seats in rooms where nobody has ever created a job, have administered our children’s ingenuity with the talent of someone selling the silver to pay the bills. They call it decline, as though it were an alignment of the stars. It is instead an administration: methodical, punctual, signed. And the remedy would fit on a line: a tax pact for those who study, return and create, locked in for ten years and beyond the reach of the next budget. The formula is not lacking. Courage is. Let those in the palaces up above know that the day this people understands what it is worth, and how much has been taken from it, it will not ask permission. It will present the bill.