Why do they leave (now)? The return to the eternal question

Abstract

As a result of European integration, Portuguese migratory flows decreased in such a way that, at the turn of the century, it was believed that Portugal had gone from being a “country of emigrants” to “country of immigrants”. Indeed, in the last decades of the twentieth century, Portugal even attracted citizens of the country which traditionally received the most significant waves of Portuguese expatriates (Brazil) and, in the global context, became part of the set of countries attractive to economic migrants. However, the recent economic crisis that marked the first years of the 21st century has revealed this reality was not consolidated, at least not as much as some social scientists have argued. This is because new migratory flows have emerged in the national territory, particularly visible in low density territories as is the case in most of the district of Guarda. In this work, with the Guarda region as a backdrop, we seek to equate “the driving springs” that are, once again, impelling these Portuguese to seek better living conditions away from the country, in an attempt to understand the extent to which these new migratory flows have a common genesis to those who preceded them or, whether, on the contrary, they have particular configurations that individualize them in the Portuguese migratory panorama.