By Nicholas Carstoiu – United Citizens of Europe · Local Ambassador contribution
What happens when an entire generation is free to leave but cannot afford to stay?
There is a question every teenager in my part of Europe learns to recognise early. What are you going to do after school? It sounds ordinary, the kind of thing an aunt asks at a birthday. But in Romania, and across much of Eastern Europe, another question often hides inside it. Not what will you become. But where will you have to go to become it. I am seventeen. I have not left. And yet the question has already found me. Europe has started asking me where I intend to build my future, and increasingly it feels as if the answer is expected to be somewhere else.
Let me be clear about one thing first, because it is easy to get wrong. Free movement is one of the best things Europe has ever built. The right to study, work and live anywhere on the continent is a genuine miracle, and I would defend it against anyone. This is not an article against open borders. It is an article about what happens when freedom of movement begins to look suspiciously like a one-way exit.
Because for millions of young people from the East and the South, mobility is legally a choice. Economically, it often feels like an instruction. If you want a serious career, you leave. If you want a decent salary, you leave. If you want to do research, you leave. When every ambitious path seems to point at the same exit, freedom of movement starts to look less like freedom and more like economic pressure with a European passport.
I grew up in a country that has been quietly emptying out for most of my life. Since the 1989 revolution, Romania has lost more than four million people, most of them to emigration, shrinking from around twenty-three million to a little over nineteen3. Roughly one in five Romanians now lives abroad. And it is not a random slice of the population that leaves. Between 2008 and 2016 alone, the number of young Romanians aged fifteen to twenty-nine fell by nearly a third. When the young leave faster than a country can replace them, the loss is not measured only in population. It is measured in teachers, engineers, doctors, entrepreneurs, future parents and future taxpayers. My country spends years raising and schooling its children, then watches its most ambitious ones board a bus to Italy, Germany or Spain, where a starting salary is often two or three times what it is here. We have become one of Europe’s great exporters. Our biggest export is us. And unlike cars, software or grain, we are not replaced once we are gone.
Here is the part Europe still avoids saying out loud. This is not only migration. It is a transfer of wealth, and it runs the wrong way. The poorer country pays to raise and educate a young person. Families invest in them. Public schools invest in them. Whole communities invest in them. Then, at the exact moment that person becomes economically productive, a richer economy collects the return, having paid for none of it. The country that could least afford to lose its talent loses it. The country that could already attract talent gains still more. And we call the whole process European convergence.
Brussels does not like to say this plainly, but it knows. The European Commission’s own maps now show nearly all of Romania and Bulgaria caught in what it politely calls a talent development trap, a region that keeps losing its young faster than it can replace them1. One of its own former commissioners was blunter: Europe, he admitted, took far too long to realise it needed fair mobility, not just free movement, and that the single market should lift people up rather than make them feel they have to move in order to get anywhere2.
And this is where the conversation gets uncomfortable. The richer parts of Europe are not villains for offering opportunity, and young people should be free to go wherever it takes them. But a Union cannot call itself cohesive while its strongest regions keep accumulating the people, the skills and the energy that its weakest regions can least afford to lose. Freedom without balance eventually turns into dependency, and dependency is not unity. Europe celebrates mobility as one of its proudest achievements. Yet when opportunity is spread so unevenly that mobility becomes a necessity for millions, freedom stops being enough.
So what do we do about it? Not by telling young people to stay. That is what a country says when it has run out of better ideas. It means a few concrete things instead. Make mobility circular, not extractive. The goal is brain circulation, not brain drain: young people who leave, gain experience in the strongest economies, and can come back, invest, or build across borders without abandoning the place that raised them. Fund rebuilding, not nostalgia. Not a sentimental bonus for coming home, but real backing for anyone who wants to start a company, a school project or a local initiative in the regions that are emptying out. The message should never be come back, we miss you. It should be come back if you want to build, and Europe will help you do it.
Measure whether young people still have a future there. We count kilometres of motorway, megawatts and GDP, but almost never the one number that decides a region’s fate: whether its young are still in it. A strategy that builds a beautiful new road out of a town its children have already left is not development. It is decoration. Infrastructure cannot save a place after its future has already boarded the train out. And make returning a choice, not a sacrifice. Europe gave us the legal right to leave. It has not yet guaranteed the economic possibility of coming back. No young European should have to read going home as a professional defeat.
Because here is the truth underneath all the statistics. My generation is not leaving because we do not care where we come from. Most of us love where we come from, painfully so. We are leaving because, too often, Europe has made ambition depend on geography. You can build your future, the continent tells us. Just not here. And a Union where your postcode still decides the size of your possibilities is not yet a truly united Europe. It is inequality with open borders.
So no, do not ask young Europeans to stay. That was always the wrong question. Ask the continent something harder instead: why does success still require so many of us to leave in the first place? Build a Europe where leaving is freedom, not necessity. Where returning is opportunity, not sacrifice. Where a young person can go anywhere without feeling that home is where ambition goes to die.
Until then, we will keep doing the one thing this continent quietly prepared us for.
We will leave.
Sources
1 European Commission, “Harnessing Talent in Europe’s Regions” and the Talent Booster Mechanism (the “talent development trap” affecting some 46 regions, including nearly all of Romania and Bulgaria):
2 László Andor (former EU Commissioner for Employment), quoted in European Data Journalism Network, “Brain drain: how the exodus of talent is redefining the map of Europe”:
3 Romania’s population fell by more than 4 million over 35 years, driven mainly by emigration (National Institute of Statistics, via Romania Insider); youth-cohort decline and the Romania–EU wage gap (OSW):
https://www.romania-insider.com/romania-population-decline-35-years-2026 and