In 2016 September 11th my family emigrated from Italy in a town called Biella to New Zealand. They left Italy because of the bad education system, work and weather. My Parents chose New Zealand because of the many opportunities that it offered. This inquiry looks at the push and pull factors that influenced my parents and many others to leave their homeland and move to the small island nation at the bottom of the South Pacific.
One of the reasons why my parents left Italy and moved to New Zealand is because of the education. Education in Italy wasn’t great in many different ways, one was because kids even from the age of 8 had no time with family because they had to finish their homework until sometimes 10:00 in the evening. Another reason is because kids were pushed from a really young age to do maths that is very hard, which made them stressed in not getting the answers right. Lastly, the most important reason is that kids and teenagers had no freedom in what they wanted to learn and study, so mum had decided to homeschool me, my brother and sister. We did this for a while but then the Ministry of Education introduced compulsory exams on people who homeschooled and so after a short time we moved to New Zealand.
Another push factor of why we moved away from Italy was because of the weather. The weather in Italy was getting worse every year, you could hardly see the blue sky, there were always clouds and in summer it was humid and it would go up to 35/40 degrees, in winter it could go down to about -2/4 degrees. In spring it rained a lot and unlike New Zealand it would have rained for days and sometimes weeks, when in New Zealand it would rain hard for a day and then it would clear out. In autumn it would be cold and windy. This shows that the weather in Italy isn’t that stable.
Another push factor is work. Work in Italy was and still is bad. The unemployment level was and still is very high, especially in the young people’s generation. Some would end up at 30 years old and still live with their parents because they can’t find a job. Also in Italy it is very common to work on Saturdays which takes away from the already limited time with family and friends. Also if that family had a mortgage because they had bought a house they would have to work late into the evening, doing extra work.
Another push factor was because there was a migrant crisis in Italy. There were heaps of deaths in the sea because these people spent all their savings on trying to escape from their country that was in war and got put into ships that were overfilled and could not carry people, and so that's how heaps died. Hardly anyone survived these voyages. And all this is because Switzerland, France and Austria closed their borders on Italy because they didn't want to be full of these refugees. Also in 2016 there was a tourist crisis too, there was too much and too little tourism which meant that there were more terrorist attacks then there already was.
I think that the most important one of these push factors is about the unemployment, it wouldn’t have been a good thing not to have a job but to rely on your parents until you are about 30, you wouldn’t really know how to find a job and how to manage yourself because you have your parents helping you with everything.
The first pull factor is the possibility of a second language. My parents moved here also because they wanted to give us an opportunity of a second language, which is English. In Italy they make you study French, which is good only if you live in France, but say that you want to go to America for work and not knowing English, you would be totally isolated. And in New Zealand English is spoken so they decide on this because it fitted with all the other choices they made to come here, which I will explain later on. The thing about English is that you can travel the world with only that one language.
Work was another pull factor. Dad’s job was and still is in the Skilled Migrant Category list, which is periodically reviewed by Immigration New Zealand in order to attract workers from overseas whether there is a lack in a specific industry. Dad is a metal machinist and leader engineer with more than twenty years of experience. Work here in New Zealand is more relaxed than in Italy. For example, people finish work at about 5:00, while in Italy, it's common to work till 6:30 or even later. That means that a person has less time available to enjoy life. Moreover, in New Zealand there are more opportunities for young people getting a job even if it's apprenticeship or even doing a part time job while they are studying.
In my opinion the most important pull factor that I agree with is about the second language such as English. English is really helpful if you want to work overseas, and since I'm Italian and i didn't know any other language back in 2016 apart from Italian, and back then I thought that if i would have known English I would have had more doors open in the future. Also if i wanted to go to a school overseas in the future to get a qualification i could have done so. Another reason is that if you know another language you could be open to find out about a different culture. The things that I have learnt from New Zealand culture are many different things. Such as different meal times, in Italy most people with a family had dinner at about 9:00 and later but here in New Zealand most families have dinner at about 5:30/7:00. In Italy also people have small lunches and breakfasts but in Italy we always had huge lunches and dinners.
Looking at and analysing all the reasons why my parents made the decision to move to New Zealand, I believe that this was a good choice, because being able to speak a second language opens more doors in the future. In addition, education in New Zealand is great because of the way you can study subjects which I had never experienced like that in Italy.