Many want to come back. I came back. And that after 23 years – that’s almost how old I am. In elementary school, I was that weird foreign kid who changed his weird name as an eight-year-old because all English speakers inherently add an invisible “i”. I wasn’t Ott. I was Oit. And that quickly became Oink.

My childhood apartment was like an embassy, and maybe that’s how I became so interested in my roots. The other reason is language. That’s what Estonia is to me. It is a way of communicating. Only later was I introduced to its physical identity. Speaking or dreaming in Estonian, I feel that I am a different person. I have made out with girls in Estonian and I have got my teeth kicked out in Estonian. And the colors and timbres of the language became a part of me.

Yet it baffles people that I would come back. Critics point to high unemployment and low wages. In a recent interview with the USA’s National Public Radio, even President Ilves said he feels poor (to be fair, he was comparing himself to his Columbia University buddies); and on the Bring Talent Home website he admits that Estonia is no longer the “land of dreams” that he remembers from his own childhood.

The country is in an enormous transition and its society is turbulent. Negative, self-destructive energy is commonplace on the streets of Tallinn, in disintegrating countryside towns, and on blood-thirsty online forums. Estonia-bashing has become hip. “It’s doubtful that anyone beside my dog and my parents are waiting for me to return to Estonia,” said Martin Murruste who studied abroad in Germany before joining the Bring Talent Home team.

The president says in a video address on the Bring Talent Home website that, “We haven’t always shown understanding and hospitality […but] Estonia has a great desire to patch its mistakes.”

The president could mean a lot of things, but emigrants recognize it as a reference to rejection, a familiar sentiment. Rejection both for leaving and coming back, for the opportunistic escape and the desire to reunite. There was a lot of pain in the Soviet era that has resulted with a disconnected generation of expats. I personally know emigrants who purposefully did not teach their children the language.

But things have changed for the better in the last decade, and the problem will never resolve itself if we concentrate only on the ills.

Why come back? The critics don’t understand that those itching to return are often idealists. Growing up far away and hearing stories about a place so foreign, Estonia becomes a storyland, and is deeply interwoven into one’s being. Plenty of outsiders shed tears when Estonia won its independence.

With such expats, a friend and I joined Estonia’s national “idea day” in 2009, a grassroots effort to share and inspire entrepreneurial thoughts. “That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” laughed a non-Estonian friend. Perhaps. But for me it was an excuse to catch up with all the other expat kids from Los Angeles who had since scattered. I persuaded 20 confused Estonian-Americans to join an hour-long English-language Skype forum. In Estonia, some saw the idea day as a hyped-up letdown. But the out-of-touch expats in Skype world were entertained.

Exodus

And so it took us this long to make a website for them? I can’t tell the president – who is a patron of the project as well as a former expat himself – how to bring people home. I can tell him how to bring home closer to them.

But first let’s ask, why summon them home? Is it a selfish or mutually serving motive?

What people need to understand – as Minister of Economic Affairs Juhan Parts said at the Bring Talent Home press conference (which appropriately took place at the airport) – is that leaving can only be human. Naturally, young people crave to explore, discover and challenge themselves. Everyone in my generation wants to leave Estonia. Elsewhere seems so refreshingly unfamiliar. People will agree to live in horrible circumstances in a land of strangers rather than remain sheltered in a safe and boring home-sweet-home. It is only natural to escape – and eventually return anew.

Nationalism is a turnoff. What we can celebrate is culture. As the president said in the video, “[…] Estonia is not only that which is born in Estonia. Estonia is a broader concept […]”.

The government cannot cage people and coerce them to be a part of something. It seems counterintuitive, but in some sense the government should jump on the bandwagon and promote internationalism before it’s too late. Because that way people are less likely to vanish – not from Estonia as a place, but as a concept.

Nevertheless, instructing people to go away isn’t much of a plan. Because the state has a problem. More leave than return and birth rates are low. The UN’s latest population report predicts 100,000 fewer Estonians by 2050.

Bringing ‘em Home

“This project is the first serious attempt to fight for these minds,” says Minister of Economic Affairs Juhan Parts.

The team spent a year researching what expats want and how to get them back. They polled 500 young people studying or working abroad. Only 11 percent said they would never come back.

However, the movement will not bloom fully if nothing changes. The focus should be less on physically bringing expats back, and instead on teaching the nation to network.

Bring Talent Home naïvely promised to return at least 25 emigrants. What good is 25 when tens of thousands have left? Moreover, the project coordinator did not refute a grapevine claim that they would be content with three people.

The state is thinking about the GDP. That is obvious from the project’s name. At the press conference, Siim Raie, director of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, responded to a journalist with a well-intentioned answer that “everyone is special.” But “talent” is inherently a qualifier. Even when registering on the website, the user is greeted with, “Talents are those cool people, who are looking for a job in Estonia and have received their education from a spiffy university abroad.”

This is all well and good, but expats need something more than just a social club for the elite. They need a support network.

What the Bring Talent Home team has done right is that it initiated a much-belated online undertaking. The website (talendidkoju.ee) has a user-friendly and slick design, giving expats and local Estonian employers a chance to create profiles and connect (Yes, I registered my account).

But expats need to communicate with fellow emigrants just as much as they need a direct line to Estonia. They need comprehensive and accessible regional networking platforms that go far beyond the inept local Estonian House websites currently functioning internationally. These websites need to be in English too because there are plenty of people who care but don’t read the language well enough to make an effort.

What's more, they need to offer much more than song festivals. Because many expats think that Estonia is nothing more than folk dancing. These virtual homes would facilitate everything from airport tickets, places to sleep and information about how to meet other expats. Even entertainment news. When I lived abroad, I found the best way to get a real feel for the current atmosphere in Estonia was to watch Ärapanija, a local comedy news program similar to the Daily Show. Movies are one of the best ways to grasp understanding for language and culture, but most people don’t know what’s out there.

A Micro Country with a Global Presence

This is how we can maintain a community and a presence abroad. When I think of the expats in the Skype forum, then I want to believe it will work. Look at how some online movements, such as couch surfing, have clouded the gap between the virtual and physical worlds. Such a thing can work for Estonia. Expats might not come back for long. They might not come back at all. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t be in touch.

There are more than 100,000 people with Estonian roots living abroad, according to the Estonian World Council. Expats don’t need a red carpet, but they need a heartfelt invitation. People want to feel that they are more than an asset; they yearn to feel that they are a part of something. Or, if you must, something special.

Ott Tammik, an editor at ERR News, believes that beer is better in Oregon and that commenter Knut Albers could possibly be an alien from outer space.