SUWAYDA, Syria (North Press) – Emigration is still a dream for most youth and university graduated in Syria’s due to the lack of work opportunities, and the deteriorating living conditions.
Although immigration provides better living conditions for some of those who emigrated, residents and specialists in social affairs believe that it will cost the country a lot to train new workers after the war.
The governorate of Suwayda, located in Syria’s south, is home to the country’s Druze minority, an ethnoreligious group which practices a monotheistic Abrahamic religion and speaks the Arabic language. Historically, the region has been mostly pro-government, even from the start of the country’s nine-year-crisis and civil war.
Mahmoud Rafiah, a resident of Suwayda city, said that he was not opposed to the emigration of his three sons, who have university degrees, to Germany in 2017.
He added that he realized the bad situation in the country and the lack of job opportunities in Suwayda forced his sons to emigrate to another country in search of a better life.
Rafiah does not deny that his children leaving was painful for him and his wife, but he holds the Syrian government responsible for not supporting its young people.
24,000 young people
A source within the Immigration and Passports Department in Suwayda said that the number of young people who have applied for passports from 2011 until now has reached 24,000.
The ages of those young people seeking to emigrate were between 19 and 39, according to the same source.
The source added to North Press, “The real numbers of those who emigrated are greater than that, because those wanted for military service take smuggling routes to Lebanon and then travel to Europe and other countries.”
Those wanted for military service in Syria cannot obtain a document that shows the government has no objection to their travel, which prevents them from obtaining regular passports.
About 13 million Syrians have been internally and externally displaced since the outbreak of the war, which represents about 60 percent of the pre-2011 Syrian population, according to the Pew Research Center.
Everyone’s obsession
Sulaf Wahba, a social researcher in Suwayda, said, “Job opportunities, bad economic situations, and military service have pushed young people to emigrate.”
These reasons are result of a study that included 100 families in Suwayda governorate, which was carried out by Wahba and her colleagues at the Noor Center for Youth Support in Suwayda.
Eight out of ten young men in Suwayda are eager to emigrate, according to a questionnaire conducted by the Noor Center.
Wahba believes that this percentage is high for a society like Suwayda, in which the concepts and customs of adherence to family, land, and social ties are widespread.
Loss
Jihad Zoghbi, a Syrian from Suwayda residing in Germany and an employee of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), said that 40 percent of the Syrians who applied for asylum in Germany between 2013 and 2020 are those with a high school diploma and above.
Zoghbi, who is also working with the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), added to North Press that unofficial studies estimate the total value of war losses in Syria at about $60 billion.
He pointed out that those losses include the cost of training skilled workers needed to reconstruct the country, in addition to direct economic losses and others to state institutions.