When war broke out in what was Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Admir Masic was 14 and fled to Italy with his family. He had a talent for chemistry and his concern was: Will I be able to study there? He went to live in Turin, finished school and then also university. He was the best. He also launched a startup, which applied a technology that he had identified with his studies of him. But for Italy he remained a refugee, a foreigner. Then he went to Germany, where they welcomed him with open arms in the most important research institute, and from there to MIT in Boston, where today he not only teaches chemistry to the best students in the world, but he launched a project to ensure that even in a refugee camp those with talent can take their MIT degree for free and thus redeem themselves, guaranteeing a better future not only for themselves but for their community. As he did.
Anna Petrova, on the other hand, in 2011 in Kiev she founded the association of Ukrainian startups: and when the war broke out in Denmark she launched a project to teach women who fled the war to do business, because, she says, that is the best way to ensure a future. For seven months you have been waiting for Italy to give you a visa.
On the stage of the Italian Tech Week before them, many explained that we should make life easier for talents, the brains would have said once, that they want to come to us. Roya Mahoboob, the first and only CEO of a startup in Afghanistan, could not say, who in her country had launched a project to ensure that women could study computer science and become architects of their own future. She couldn’t do it because we didn’t give her a visa and we didn’t give it to her because we wanted her birth certificate, which she, who lives in New York, cannot produce having fled her country when the Taliban took the power.
In Italy we don’t have a problem of invasion by foreigners, we have a problem of inability to welcome talent.