Since today’s youth are more liberally oriented, they hold family, nation, and religion in less regard than previous generations. In their eyes, the nation and the state actually exist only for the elite to maintain power under the guise of some established values.
This is one of the responses given by Dr. Tado Jurić (42), an assistant professor, in an interview for Saturday’s Slobodna Dalmacija. I have not read sharper, more coherent, atypical, yet well-founded theses about Croatian reality in a long time. Moreover, he offers several evidently well-thought-out proposals on what to do regarding emigration and demographics in general. Jurić is a demographic expert. He is the author of the research ‘Perception of Emigrants about Croatia‘ which will soon be published in his book about ‘millennial gastarbeiters‘. No matter how much a chronicler tries to avoid prejudices, after reading the lengthy interview with Jurić, the impression of the scientist’s breadth and courage is reinforced by the fact that he is a lecturer from whom one would expect a significant dose of conservatism, given that he works at the Croatian Catholic University.
Driving Away Injustice
Thus, Jurić states: ‘The most elegant solution is to say that people emigrate because they want to get rich quickly, and look, Croatia was at war and cannot reach the Western standard so quickly. Interestingly, the same thesis was used by politicians in Yugoslavia who, for a full 30 years after the war, always referred to the war to justify their failures.’
Noting that since entering the EU, Croatia has the most negative trends among member states regarding emigration, Jurić continues to dissect politicians: ‘Politicians in power always benefit from emigration because they rationally calculate and have concluded that emigration does not harm them at all but actually even favors them… remittances arrive, and critics depart.‘ He also finds it interesting that local corruption ‘has done more damage to Croatian national identity than it has harmed the economy.’ He concludes that millennials are driven away from Croatia by injustice, while the West attracts them with false allure.
The assistant professor has lived and worked in Germany for years, so his explanation that the developed part of Europe, especially Germany, which needs to import at least 500,000 workers annually to sustain its pension system, ‘drains the EU’s periphery’ carries additional weight. Particularly striking is the assessment that it seems ‘as if they have assigned us the role of Europe’s weekend house, Europe’s nursing home, and the EU’s shield against illegal migration.’ Dr. Tado Jurić’s calculation that Croatia has ‘donated’ an entire state budget to Germany in the form of money for the education of qualified workers – over 18 billion euros – is also interesting.
