Economic trends and lack of hope are driving renewed migration
Faced with the fact that thousands of Albanians are leaving the country to seek a better life in Western Europe in breach of migration laws and Albania’s international agreements, Albanian authorities have made it much harder to leave the country.
To protect the visa-free regime Albania has with much of Western Europe, border officials are turning back hundreds of would-be travelers every day for not having enough documents or money to justify their trip. In doing so, they are coming increasingly under accusations of stereotyping based on where the traveler was born as well as his or her social status and skin color.
Authorities have a right to perform a risk assessment for travelers looking to breach migration laws, and they do so in many countries. But there is a fine line between enforcing immigration laws and introducing virtual exit visas. They are likely to target people in high risk of seeking asylum – mostly poor Albanians from rural areas and the country’s Roma citizens, because they are the likeliest to break free-movement laws.
However, these are all short term measures. The reality is that economic trends and lack of hope are driving this renewed migration. Albanians want to leave for the same reason they have for more than two decades: Albania is poor and is not getting richer fast enough.
Several media outlets reporting from rural areas in southwestern and northeastern Albania indicate thousands of people have already left, with the phenomenon most visible in a sharp drop in schoolchildren.
The previous migration pattern had been that young men leave alone, so it is particularly worrying to see young families jumping ship. It indicates a loss of hope in Albania and its future.
It is also important that the country’s political leaders do not make this into us-vs-them political issue, but rather cooperate to come up with solutions and policies that make people want to stay and not leave the country.
There are increasing indicators that the government’s recent rule of law drive, which this newspaper strongly supported, might have had some unintended consequences among the country’s poorest residents, including a higher than usual financial burden due to accumulated unpaid power bills and job losses due to illegally-constructed shops being torn down.
There is also anecdotal evidence that in an effort to clean its lists from fraudulent recipients, the state social service has cut the meager social assistance it offered to many people who needed it to survive on a daily basis, driving them into further desperation. Both Socialist- and Democrat-run local government units have also been accused of being inefficient in distributing social assistance to the poorest families.
These governments’ inefficiency is only part of the story. The driving factor are economic realities that don’t affect just Albania but the entire region.
Yes, it is true, as the government says, that Albanians are falling victims to traffickers who want to take their money by lying to them about jobs and papers awaiting in Germany or elsewhere. But there is more to the story.
Albania and the region are still under the strong effects of the European economic crisis, which has slowed down economic and political progress and stretched out the countries’ EU integration journeys.
Putting up walls at the border is not the solution, making life better in Albania is. Albanian authorities need to work harder, but our European partners must also step up and do more.
