one of the criticisms, the likes of Krugman et al. would make, about the reasons a common currency project would not work in a sub-optimal common currency zone which is the EU (and the Eurozone parts of it), was that there was, no matter how much progress had been made in the past generation or two, simply not enough labor mobility between the member states comprising the currency zone to make it work (just one of many reasons the zone is "sub-optimal," of course).

Well, it turns out that there is indeed a fair amount of labor mobility one observes among the EU's youngest members of the workforce. Outside of the Eurozone. The Irish, Italians and Greeks to Australia and Canada. The Portuguese to Brazil and, of all places, Angola. And the Spanish pretty much anywhere in the vast Spanish-speaking world. We're a long ways from the 1960's and '70's when waves of Iberian workers came to France, or the Italians to Belgium and so forth. People go where there is opportunity relative to their education, and by and large they're well educated, and these days, if they want opportunity at par with their dreams, Germany or France are pretty much the last place they'd want to go, the barriers to entry into the respesctive job markets are simply too high and no one in Germany is making any effort to attract them by, say, large-scale subsidized language sejours/training schemes.

Full disclosure: I myself went the same route of emigration, in my case temporary (14 years), the last time the Germans, with French complicity, caused a recession in Europe (the early 1990's).

Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant