Since 2008 3.75 million jobs have been lost in Spain and the labour market has become more precarious, especially among young people. According to INJUVE (2014), the Spanish youth unemployment rate in people between 16 and 29 years old reached 38.73% in December 2014. In this context of economic crisis, young people have considered migration as a strategy to find a job and find a solution to their precarious situation in Spain.Social sciences have studied migration processes from different perspectives. Economists consider that migration has to be understood as a labour market adjustment of labour forces; sociologists consider the personal networks to be the key to understand why people migrate; anthropologists, among others, consider the intercultural encounters to be one of the topics of interest in migration. There are many social studies about the reasons why people migrate about how they feel, how they get integrated to the hosting country, how they interact with their country once they are abroad, etc. But not many of them discuss how the sending society (in this case Spain) do conceptualise the exit people from its society.This paper is based on four years fieldwork in London working with Catalan young migrants and discusses how different social agents (politicians, social movements and migrants) do explain the emigration process of Spanish young people: are they leaving because of a personal desire, because of a lack of job opportunities, or because the austerity policies are expulsing them?

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