“Argentina opens doors to migrants, but settling elsewhere is harder. As growing numbers of Europeans leave the continent and its economic woes, how easy is it to go and live in a new country?” This is the headline to a [Guardian](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/22/argentina-open-doors-migrants-settle) article containing some research about which countries offer an easy way to escape Europe and which do not.
These true “economic migrants” have many options but Latin America is considered one of the favourite destinations.
Witnesses to the success of rejecting the pervading neoliberal economic model in its more extreme expression many countries in Latin America are growing, developing and asserting themselves in the international arena. Brazil is now the 6th world economy, ahead of the UK, and Argentina is giving a computer to each schoolchild. Problems arising from decades of political instability, multinationals’ pillaging and lack of investment such as drug trafficking, violence, crime and poverty are still visible, but the direction is clearly towards development.
A quiet bloodless revolution has been sweeping the continent. The most remarkable phenomenon is that the peoples have dared elect alternative leaders, with a virtual news blackout in the international Media about their achievements. It does not mean such countries are immune to the global economic crisis, but they are certainly more protected than if they had allowed themselves to be bullied into submission by the international financial system, as they had done in the past.
Let us hope that the many refugee stockbrokers and business advisers escaping the crumbling European financial institutions do not manage to infect their new homes with the same modus operandi that led to their ruin. In other words, it is essential to learn that investment in production and social well being rather than speculation is the only way to ensure progress for all concerned.
In the words of Silo: “Humanists do not overstate their case when they contend that the world is now technologically capable of swiftly resolving the problems in employment, food, health care, housing, and education that exist today across vast regions of the planet. If this possibility is not being realized, it is simply because it is prevented by the monstrous speculation of big capital.” *Document of the Humanist Movement*
How will this new wave of migration be received in Latin America? Will university graduates and professionals become cleaners and domestic help, like many Latin Americans were forced to do on arriving in Europe? Unlikely, as in spite of the progress made there is still an “inferiority complex”, one of those colonial leftovers that plant in people’s consciousness the belief that anything imported is better than the national product. On the good side this may prevent the waste of human capital so common in the great migrations.
