NEW YORK: Vasileios Bouras decided he would take on $50,000 in loans from his family to come to study in America rather than bet his future on his home country of Greece ever being able to pay back its debt.

That was at the start of the Greek financial crisis, when Bouras, now 27, left Athens for graduate school at Columbia University. Now he has a tech job in this city’s Garment District, a good salary, a buzzing social life — and a whole lot of guilt.

“The most beautiful country in the world,” he said Friday of his native land, before calling it “a sinking ship.”

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As Greece races to complete a new bailout agreement with Europe, economists say its future is imperilled no matter what because of a terrible economy that has been in many ways most punishing for young Greeks and forced thousands of the nation’s youth abroad for work and school.

The exodus of young Greeks — driven by fruitless job searches in Athens, depleting bank accounts and the mass-mailing of applications abroad — marks a massive brain drain that could deprive the country of leading minds for a generation. Regardless of whether the crisis forces Greece from the continent’s single-currency zone, the loss of that talent will cast a shadow over the country.

“We are going to be in a situation where it’s a country of older people,” Lois Labrianidis, a secretary general in the Greek economic and infrastructure ministry who has studied the brain drain, said in a phone interview from Athens.

“It’s going to be a huge blow for society as well as the economy.”

With a youth unemployment rate near 50 per cent, it might not seem surprising that many of Greece’s young people are leaving. But it is a testament to the severity of Greece’s crisis, given that brain drains are rare in developed nations with well-regarded education systems.

Over the past five years, more than 200,000 Greeks have left, shaving about 2pc from the country’s population. The majority of those economic refugees are young and well-educated, according to several research papers. Immigration out of the country is up 300pc from pre-crisis levels.

Bouras has had the strange experience of watching his country shrivel from afar. He saw on his social media feed that suicides back home were up 45pc. When he spoke recently with his parents, both public school teachers, his mom said students had passed out from hunger during class. Bouras easily pays rent for his one-bedroom in Midtown, but his uncle in Greece days ago broke into tears, fearful he’d lose his life savings that was stuck in a bank.

As a result, Bouras mostly keeps his happy moments in America to himself. He doesn’t share photos of drinking or easy weekends on Facebook. When he met up with 15 Greek friends — mostly recent immigrants — at a rented house in upstate New York over the Fourth of July weekend, they lounged and ate Bouras’s Greek burgers while Athens was in turmoil over a bailout referendum. Few spoke a word about the weekend to their families.

“Or, look at us right now, drinking a beer at 7:30pm,” Bouras said this week during an interview at a bar near his office. “It’s a little unfair, right?”

To produce the young generation that’s now moving abroad, Greece needed a lot of things to go right and a few things to go horribly wrong. Greek millennials were the product of a free national college education system and decades of development that helped their parents and grandparents build up savings. But even before entering the workforce, they were also burned by the catastrophic decisions of older Greeks, who enforced a system of over-borrowing and negligent tax collection.

By arrangement with Washington Post-Bloomberg News Service

Published in Dawn, July 12th, 2015

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