Are you a migrant or on a gap year?

During the first half of the last century, many Spaniards were forced to seek their fortunes abroad, emigrating to Cuba and Venezuela in the early 1900s, or heading to France, Germany, and Switzerland for shorter periods during the tough times of the 1950s and 1960s to work in factories and hotels. But from the 1970s onwards, a generation emerged that was able to take advantage of the country's fast-growing economy to stay at home; by the 1990s, for the first time in its history, the country was attracting large numbers of immigrants, who came from Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe to make a life in Spain.

Since the property bubble burst in 2007, however, and with the situation worsened by the chill winds of a global recession and the ongoing crisis in the euro zone, unemployment has risen sharply. Spain now has the European Union's highest joblessness rate, at more than 20 percent of the workforce, and around 40 percent for the under 25s. From a net importer, Spain has quickly become a net exporter of people. The first to leave have been immigrants - the group in society that has been hardest hit by unemployment - but around 10 percent of the almost 600,000 people to leave the country this year will have been Spaniards.

Spain has quickly gone from being an importer to a net exporter of people

"There's no reason why I should head back to Spain any time soon"

Unlike their forebears, today's Spaniards looking for opportunities abroad are usually university graduates and speak at least one other language. And their reasons for going are not necessarily because they can't find work here.

Take Juan Gamboa: three years ago, he decided to try his luck in Germany. A sound engineer with a job at Warner Music, he had a good salary and enjoyed his work, but felt that he wanted more out of life.

"My passion is electronic music, and Berlin is where it's all happening. My girlfriend came too. I see life as an experience, travel broadens the mind. I'm in no hurry to return. There's no reason why I should head back to Spain any time soon," says Gamboa. He already speaks English, and is now learning German. He says that the appeal of Germany is that costs are lower than Spain.

"I don't earn much, and I make a bit extra teaching music, but my rent is cheap: I pay 500 euros for a 70-meter apartment. Money isn't the priority at the moment."

Juan certainly doesn't see himself as an emigrant in the traditional sense of somebody moving to another country for purely economic reasons, unlike Lucía Camacho and her husband, who came to Spain 10 years ago from Ecuador. She took a job as a cleaner, and he worked in a bar. During their time in Spain, they had two children. They decided to go back to Ecuador a year ago.

"Life is different here," Camacho pauses, trying to find the words to express what it is she missed in her homeland, or what Spain failed to give her: "Perhaps Spain wasn't quite civilized enough for me," she laughs.

Back in Ecuador, she no longer works, while her husband has managed to find temporary work in a mattress factory. Her husband and children now have Spanish nationality: "They want to go back to Spain, but I think things are more difficult there," she says, adding: "We were treated very well there, but in the end I missed my family here."

Javier García Centeno, an economist for the United Left (IU) party, is concerned about the demographic shift. He points out that Spain's population will probably shrink overall by around half a million people during the coming decade.

"At the same time as people are leaving, the birth rate is also declining again. The crisis is to blame for all this. We have to fight to create employment; we need state money to help small and midsized companies, because they are the ones that generate employment. We shouldn't be surprised if people leave the country to look for work abroad, because all we have focused on here is tourism and services. We have lost our industrial and manufacturing base," García Centeno says.

The IU economist fears that Spain is starting to experience a significant brain drain during a crisis that is going to get a lot worse before it blows over. If things improve, the country is going to have trouble kick-starting its economy thereafter, as it won't be able to attract international companies in need of an educated work force.

As García Centeno points out, Spain's unemployment problem has only recently become a priority for the two main parties. Banking sector restructuring and avoiding the fate of Ireland and Greece remains front and center, and that's where government aid is going.

He believes that as it will be several years before things begin to improve, the next government needs to take measures to address the country's low birthrate, and that means more help for families. "It's obvious. If education and health are being cut back, then people won't want to have children," he explains.

Spain's birth rate has been falling for the last two decades, and remains among the lowest in Europe. Young people stay at home longer, meaning that the average age women give birth is almost 30. The country's divorce rate is on a par with the highest levels in other EU countries, and in most families women now work, meaning potential mothers tend to put off having a child even longer. But Julio Pérez, an expert in demography at the CSIC National Research Council, says there is no need for alarm.

"The cyclical changes in the rate are not going to change. Spain has the resources and is sufficiently developed not to have to worry about a serious drop in population. Immigrants returning home can have an impact on small communities, where we will likely see the average age of the population increase, but in broader terms, it doesn't change things much," he says. The sociologist Joaquín Arango also warns against panicking about population decrease. "Countries like the Netherlands and Germany have also seen emigration, yet they still remain centers of immigration."

But many in Spain are concerned about the exodus of young people, not all of whom fit Juan Gamboa's free-and-easy profile. "Sure, there are networks that allow young people to travel. They may have studied abroad and made friends, and it's good that they aren't afraid, but my impression is that most of them are not leaving because they want to, and that they certainly would like to come home," says sociologist Antonio Alaminos of Alicante University.

Spain's political parties have been slow to react to the problem of youth unemployment, and some politicians, rather than seeing a brain drain, prefer to interpret the growing numbers of young people leaving the country as a sign of European integration. "They are part of the European labor market," says the Socialist Party's Pedro Sánchez. The party's prime-ministerial candidate, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, does have a plan to create work by using money raised through a banking levy. When contacted by EL PAÍS on the question of youth unemployment, the Popular Party refused to comment on whether it had a strategy to create more jobs for younger people.

"What we are seeing is growing numbers of young people who are turning their back on materialism, on what they see as the lack of values in society," says sociologist Fernando Gil of the University of Salamanca. "They are looking for adventure in some cases, and have reached the conclusion that there is little to lose by taking a few years out. Others are leaving city life behind, and heading off to the countryside, or to the Canary Islands, for example," he says.