Migration: an analysis from the construction of professional life projects by university students

Migration: an analysis from the construction of professional life projects by university students

La migración: un análisis desde la construcción de proyectos de vida profesional por los estudiantes universitarios

Migrações: uma análise a partir da construção de projetos de vida profissional por estudantes universitários

**Cite as**
Mainegra Fernández, D., Estrada Méndez, N.L. & Piñera Concepción, Y.C. (2024) Migration: an analysis from the construction of professional life projects by university students. Mendive. Journal of Education, 22(1), e3658. https://mendive.upr.edu.cu/index.php/MendiveUPR/article/view/3658

The objective of the article is a reflective analysis of the construction of professional life projects in emigration by university students. For its preparation, the methods of bibliographic review and documentary analysis were used with selection criteria based on the date of publication and preference in the last five years. The phrases used in the search engines were: migration, emigration of professionals, life projects, professional life projects and educational orientation. In the selection, articles from scientific journals indexed in high-impact databases were privileged. The main results indicate that the loss of talent due to emigration to countries with prosperous economies is one of the causes of the slow development of the global south. It was concluded that educational bodies, in general, and universities in particular, must incorporate into their training processes the deconstruction of professional life projects in emigration and incorporate the work of educational guidance in favor of the permanence of professionals in their country. of origin to participate in the positive transformation of their social and economic reality.

Keywords: training of professionals; migration; Life projects; Job opportunities; orientation.

El artículo persigue como objetivo un análisis reflexivo sobre la construcción de proyectos de vida profesional en la emigración por los estudiantes universitarios. Para su elaboración se emplearon los métodos de revisión bibliográfica y análisis documental con criterio de selección basado en la fecha de publicación y preferencia en los últimos cinco años. Las frases empleadas en los motores de búsqueda fueron: migración, emigración de profesionales, proyectos de vida, proyectos de vida profesional y orientación educativa. En la selección se privilegiaron los artículos de revistas científicas indexadas en bases de datos de alto impacto. Los principales resultados indican que la pérdida de talentos por la emigración a los países con economías prósperas es una de las causas del lento desarrollo del sur global. Se concluyó que las instancias educativas, en general, y las universidades en particular, deben incorporar a sus procesos formativos la deconstrucción de proyectos de vida profesional en la emigración e incorporar el trabajo de orientación educativa a favor de la permanencia de los profesionales en su país de origen para participar en la trasformación positiva de la realidad social y económica de estos.

Palabras clave: formación de profesionales; migración; proyectos de vida; oportunidades laborales; orientación.

O objetivo do artigo é uma análise reflexiva sobre a construção de projetos de vida profissional na emigração por parte de estudantes universitários. Para sua elaboração foram utilizados os métodos de revisão bibliográfica e análise documental com critérios de seleção baseados na data de publicação e preferência nos últimos cinco anos. As frases utilizadas nos motores de busca foram: migração, emigração de profissionais, projetos de vida, projetos de vida profissional e orientação educacional. Na seleção foram privilegiados artigos de revistas científicas indexadas em bases de dados de alto impacto. Os principais resultados indicam que a perda de talentos devido à emigração para países com economias prósperas é uma das causas do lento desenvolvimento do sul global. Concluiu-se que os órgãos educativos, em geral, e as universidades em particular, devem incorporar nos seus processos formativos a desconstrução dos projetos de vida profissional na emigração e incorporar o trabalho de orientação educativa em prol da permanência dos profissionais no seu país de origem. participar na transformação positiva da sua realidade social e económica.

Palavras-chave: formação de profissionais; migração; projetos de vida; oportunidades de trabalho; orientação.

During the covid-19 pandemic, predictions regarding life after this health contingency were often heard on social media, predicting a progressive transformation of human behavior towards solidarity and love of neighbor, in a world transformed for good, in favor of unity. However, today we are witnessing a very different reality, with a growing context of wars between nations and a notable worsening of the economic crisis, especially reflected in food and rampant inflation.

This panorama has triggered the exodus of thousands of human beings in search of security and satisfaction of their most basic needs, such as access to water, housing and work.

This phenomenon is called migration and includes various causes and variants, since it can occur within the country itself and be classified as internal migration, or outside the nation of origin, which is called emigration (Baretta, 2019). This article will focus its attention on the latter as it is the one that affects the most, since it usually generates, among other consequences, the loss of human resources, the main wealth of any state.

The media provide continuous coverage of a phenomenon that has worsened in recent times: the illegal emigration of thousands of Central American and Caribbean compatriots to the United States.

The so-called Caravans, convened by social networks and organized for weeks at a specific point in the nations of this region, set off on a journey without legality or a safe horizon, towards the north, in search of the American dream, which many times turned into nightmare and the end of the lives of its members.

But the migration problem is not limited to Latin America. Before the astonished eyes of the planet's inhabitants, a phenomenon occurs that, although not new, takes on a dimension never seen before. It seems that the borders and the maps that delimit the countries and their territories and populations have entered into a process of change, which seems to have no end. Despite the armies, the walls that are built and the security systems that control the territorial limits, geography is configured again, as if we were experiencing the end of this artificial convention and we begin to talk about the planet as "a global village' crossed by flows, mechanisms and processes of interdependence" (Loidor, 2017, p. 156).

Unfortunately, far from being a calm evolution, the transition that humanity is experiencing generates fear, causes strong tensions, tears and conflicts that range from daily coexistence to international relations. Crimes and hate speech have worsened and multiplied, which have their roots in social pathologies (Cortina, 2017, p. 23-26).

It is indisputable that the problem of migration underlies a problem of justice; According to reports from organizations such as UNHCR, the reasons why almost 90 million people are forced to emigrate, among others, are hunger, violence, lack of work, unfair and miserable wages; internal armed conflicts of countries, wars and droughts. If these causes did not exist, surely a large majority of populations would never abandon their country, their culture, their customs, their food, their music. In other words, everything that gives them identity (Gil, 2023).

Another current trend in international migration is its selective nature, a reality determined by the demand for cheap labor from receiving countries that do not incur training or training costs. Not the unemployed or the surplus of workers emigrate, but above all, those who have better qualifications to compete in the place of destination.

With the professionals who emigrate, knowledge and development also disappear, and the differences in the standards of living and well-being that separate those who live in a part of the world, the one with the greatest socio-economic development, from the majority of others increase. human beings, those who inhabit the rest of the planet. Hence the global concern about the loss of qualified resources (Blanco and Hernández, 2016).

The authors of this work agree with Gil (2023) that when faced with the fact of migration the only appropriate position is to examine its characteristics, its proximate and remote causes, in order to, in view of all this, reach international agreements that make it unnecessary and while This is not achieved, guaranteeing that it is carried out under the best conditions both for the individual who emigrates and for the prestige of the State from which he or she comes and the benefit of the country to which he or she goes.

For years, the Central American region has been considered a focus of tension in the immigration issue due to the large number of people, mostly young people, who embark on the path of migration as a life project, a good part of them heading to the United States.

This situation becomes a vicious circle that deprives these nations of the human resources they require to guide their economies towards development and condemns them to the fact that new generations continue looking to the north as a solution to their existential problems.

El Salvador is no exception. Beyond the income received from family remittances, the phenomenon destroys the family as an institution and condemns it to the loss of many of its best children. Currently, a government that tries to rescue the dignity of the nation has made efforts to improve security and promote new opportunities for youth, however, emigration persists as a phenomenon, with the aggravating factor that criminals and human traffickers from the Transit nations profit from the dreams of these people.

The researchers believe that educational institutions, that is, the school, the community, religion and the family, must join forces to prevent illegal emigration, so that youth only leave the country for reasons of family reunification, studies or other causes of force majeure, but not as the only possible life improvement project.

The objective of this article is the theoretical analysis of the construction of professional life projects by university students. It can be illuminating about the state of the art of this problem, as well as contribute to giving a pedagogical vision of how education can deconstruct professional life projects in emigration, to build, in their place, perspectives of participation in development. of the nations of origin.

The migratory phenomenon, which destroys families and costs thousands of lives to the nations of origin, has acquired the dynamics of avalanches, which grow as they advance, so that more and more human beings are leaving everything behind them, they undertake a journey in search of peace, food security or work that guarantees family subsistence and a home for their offspring.

This is not only a problem of emerging economies, as some authors propose, since the number of people with higher education has grown considerably; However, the labor market has not followed a parallel development in terms of providing opportunities to incorporate qualified personnel (Capote and Fernández, 2021; Elgorriaga Astondoa et al., 2020).

In this sense, the increase in qualified emigration from Spain caused by high unemployment rates would coincide with the reasons for emigrating from other southern European countries, as would be the case of the youth of Greece and Portugal (Vázquez et al., 2021), to which we should add, in the case of Spain, the austerity measures implemented (Domínguez Mújica et al., 2019), not so for Italian youth who, according to the results of the research presented by Staniscia (2018), they emigrate for psychological and cultural reasons.

The motivations to migrate are varied, among the main ones the following have been identified (ECLAC, 2020)

In the case of Central America, it is a multicausal phenomenon, determined by the economic inequalities and political instability prevailing in the region, as well as by the stimuli to human mobility, resulting from the development of communications and transportation of people (Arboleya, 2021).

On the other hand, governments of developed countries continue to implement strategies to attract and retain international talents that contribute to the development of their economies. In this sense, immigration processes have been launched that facilitate the entry of professionals from other countries. For example, Canada has the Express Entry program, which is a points-based system that takes into account several factors, including academic grades, age, and languages. Likewise, for several years the US has been granting H-1B visas that are intended for people with a higher education degree or its equivalent (Fernández, Enríquez, Zapíen and Horcasitas, 2021).

Hence the need for analysis and policies focused on contributing to the formation of professional life projects in university students that induce them to remain in their countries of origin, to contribute with their knowledge to the improvement of the quality of life and the development of these.

In general terms, the largest number of Latin American emigrants, and Salvadorans in particular, is to the United States, however at least 1.4 million of them live in this country, and half are in an irregular immigration situation, according to a survey by 2022 published by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the Central Reserve Bank of El Salvador. The study was carried out in six states in the United States during the month of August 2022, and revealed that at least 60.2% of Salvadorans living in the North American nation intend to return to their country.

This situation is even more regrettable when many of them left with complete professional training, but are unable to enter the area of knowledge for which they were trained, and only access jobs of lower complexity and remuneration due to unequal competition with nationals.

The final purpose of the research from which this article is based is to characterize the determining factors that promote the intention of emigration of university students and to promote a debate with adequate information on possible recommendations that help reduce this continuous loss of capital. intellectual in the context of Higher Education institutions, for which the authors consider that the sensitization of the faculty with this problem is decisive.

They are also of the opinion that the educational teaching process of university institutions must be more proactive in addressing the causes of this phenomenon, because the achievement of peace and citizen security in El Salvador must be accompanied by a commitment of its children with participation in the construction of a nation with higher standards of quality of life, for which the participation of professionals is crucial.

The main asset of the global knowledge society is intellectual capital. It is the new production factor that makes the difference between underdeveloped, emerging and advanced countries. Nations compete with different strategies to attract professional personnel that allow them to improve their performance by generating new knowledge (De la Vega and Vargas, 2017).

No less true is that the demographic dynamics of nations need an adequate generational change that guarantees the existence of a qualified workforce to stimulate the production of goods and services that support, not only own or family consumption, but also that of those sectors of society unable to return to work due to being at the extremes of age, or requiring special care due to their health condition.

Hence the importance of scientific research related to the topic, which covers the various variables that comprise it, among which is the emigration of professionals, with the consequent cost for countries that lose the human memories best prepared to face current challenges. of scientific, technological, industrial and service development that would promote growth in all areas.

Because migration is a multivariate and multivalent phenomenon since the receiving country, despite the expenses that the creation of infrastructure to receive entire families in its territory may generate, benefits from access to culture, idiosyncrasy and tacit knowledge. and/or academic that they bring with them, while the country of origin often sees this as access to sources of income through family remittances and the investment of capital obtained by its nationals in the country in which they settle.

The construction of deep links with the professional diaspora, through collaboration in scientific, academic and religious networks, and even through direct investment, as an alternative to the reality of the migratory event, as well as the formation of human potential outside borders, through study scholarships and other variants financed and/or attended directly by the emigration of the benefited nation, are variants in the approach towards the phenomenon that will be taken into account in the present study.

However, his vision is based on the intentional deconstruction of migratory professional life projects, through the education of love for the native country and the unveiling of work and entrepreneurship opportunities that lead to the satisfaction of needs, as well as the cultivation of religious and cultural spirituality.

The construction of life projects, as part of the psychological maturity of an individual, is associated with the context of interaction of each one, in which many factors take part that in some way determine the real possibilities of achieving it, in addition, the process The formation of the subject's personality plays a very important role in this.

Other authors recognize its continuous and systematic nature throughout life, encompassing the various spheres in which the evolution of the human being develops, thereby approaching a new configuration: the professional life project, to which Meléndez and Páez (2017) recognize as a general structuring and integration of the personality that channels its directions, in a set of professional motives, in a flexible and consistent manner, in a future temporal dimension, in the medium or long term, that organizes the main aspirations. and professional achievements of the person through strategies for their achievement.

In this regard, D'Angelo (2002) believes that creative professional development can be understood as the direction that the life project assumes in professional activity, based on the formation of a general dimension of professional life (Development of the Professional Perspective -DPP), which expresses the broader frame of reference for locating the profession in the social and personal Context of Life Projects.

It is, without a doubt, a complex abstraction, as a result of the evolution in a specific historical-cultural context of an individual that leads him to make certain decisions regarding his future performance, once he has completed his training cycle, because involves the profession acquired as a result of it.

A person's life project must be essentially made up of their vital and social purpose, the objectives they set for it, their decisions or positions in the various situations of their existence and their relationships, their personal or material resources. that he has, by the values that mark his behavior, his thoughts, by the way he acts and behaves, and, finally, by his own definition as an individual being within a community. What I want to do? Who I want to be? How do I want to act? What do I want to contribute? What do I want to receive? (Civila, 2018).

Del Río and Cuenca (2019) emphasize that educational actions related to the formation of the professional life project constitute a necessity in the initial training of students.

The authors consider, therefore, that the agencies that intervene in one way or another in education (school, family, community, religious institutions, media, social networks) play a very important role in the structuring and achievement of the educational project. life and, particularly, the professional life project.

In light of this, it is considered essential that universities, in their capacity as active entities in the aforementioned training process, play a prominent role in relation to shaping the personality of future professionals, particularly with regard to ethics, morality and love for the native land, which stimulates in them the desire to actively participate in the construction of its development, both social and economic, with a view to achieving a standard of living that considerably reduces the exodus of labor force to other nations. . This should be one of the objectives of the teaching-learning process in these institutions.

Labarrere (1995), in order to ensure that learning promotes personality development, proposes a strategy that he calls self-reflective and self-transformative learning, according to which it is essential that the student goes through knowledge and transformation of himself.

Self-regulation, in a general sense, would be: "all the activity that a subject carries out in order to generate, maintain and modify their behavior in correspondence with purposes or objectives that have been outlined by oneself or accepted as personally valid" (Labarrere, A., 1995, p. 34).

This strategic conception of the PEA based on personality transformation is applicable to the achievement of professional life projects that contribute to national development, especially if we take into account the complex situation faced by emigrants with university training to carry out their projects. of working life in the countries to which they emigrate.

The vulnerability of emigrants, in general, and particularly in the realization of their professional life projects, has been recognized by previous studies (De Prada, Actis, and Pereda, 2008).

All of which supports the authors' criteria regarding the importance of a pedagogical intervention that covers all areas of university training, namely, academic, extension, labor and research, aimed at the deconstruction of professional life projects in emigration. in Higher Education students.

Academic-professional decisions are not made in a vacuum. To build a professional project, people must analyze their values, capabilities, skills and competencies. The construction of the life project begins throughout the secondary stage and must be constantly reviewed. Students must be trained to: 1) specify their life project and specify their goals; 2) recognize and evaluate the resources you have and need; 3) determine priorities and choose objectives; 4) balance resources to achieve multiple goals; 5) learn from past actions and project future ones; 6) track how your projects are progressing; 7) make the necessary adjustments in the life project (Santana et al., 2019).

In coherence with what has been expressed, it is important to understand the significance of educational work in the formation of future projects and in particular professional life projects, taking into account that the social situation of development in youth age favors the implementation of strategies in the training process, which allows the young person to outline objectives and their corresponding strategies, expression of the integration of cognitive, affective and self-evaluative contents , which allow the regulation of behavior. The approaches to the problem of educating professional life projects have been varied, considering in their study, dynamizers of the subject's present behavior (Garbizo and Ordaz, 2016).

According to Lachalde (2020), a guiding intervention at the level of a microprocess can be aimed at university students in their final years, supported by the Theoretical Operational Model (MTO).

Currently, educational guidance, regardless of its application, has become a comprehensive response to the recognition of the potential that all people have, who through self-knowledge, information and decision making can strengthen social, cultural and economic interaction of its relational context (Ormaza, 2019).

The term orientation means the action of locating or recognizing the surrounding space (spatial orientation) and locating oneself in time (temporal orientation). The word orientation comes from the cardinal point East (east, where the sun rises). It was used for the first time in Kelly's doctoral thesis in 1914, who defined educational guidance as an activity of a procedural nature, aimed at providing help to the student, both in the choice of studies and in the solution of adjustment or adaptation problems. to school (Repetto, 2002).

Consequently, the orientation with its surname "educational" is linked to the development function of people. In its beginnings, it was linked to vocational or professional guidance; Throughout the 20th century, it considerably expanded its field of intervention to learning difficulties, teaching strategies and attention to diversity such as prevention and personal development, education for career, for life, among others. Thus, it is currently conceived as a help process aimed at all people, throughout life, with the aim of promoting the development of the integral personality (Vela and Cáceres, 2019).

The constant loss of its main source of wealth: human resources, condemns the nations of the south to always pursue the dream of an economic-social development that is impossible without them. Studies on the subject show that it is a universal problem, but that it affects, above all, the most backward economies, which contradictorily are the ones that need them the most. The causes of human mobility are multiple in nature, hence there is no exclusive formula to stop its flows; however, the protection of those priority sectors for the transformation and growth of nations cannot be renounced.

Life projects as a complex psychological formation, exclusive to human beings, which are integrated into the various processes of personality formation, are susceptible to being partially or totally transformed, through the positive influence of the various educational agencies, for example. what the university, in interaction with the various religious denominations, the public and private labor sector, the family and the community, can play an important role in the formation of values and motives to reorient professional life projects in emigration, way for young professionals to actively integrate into the transformation of the socio-economic context of their country of origin.

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The authors participated in the design and writing of the article, in the search and analysis of the information contained in the consulted bibliography.