TIRANA, Dec. 14 – Albania’s government has announced it will start a process in January to count and register all Albanian citizens who live abroad.
The diaspora, in terms of people eligible for Albanian passports, could be as large as two million, according to estimates.
However, the exact number of non-resident citizens is unknown, but the country has about 4.5 citizens registered in its lists and only about 2.8 million residents based on the 2011 census.
In cases of elections, the number of the voters is higher than the official number of the population in the country, with many traveling to Albania to vote.
The government says the registration means à©migrà©s will also be able to cast their vote where they live in the future, something not done in the last post-communist 25 years.
The project has been prepared by the Interior Ministry. The registration will provide crucial information about the number of Albanians living outside the country and where they are distributed.
The government will open a portal where people can declare themselves as Albanians living abroad.
At the start, the registration, for a certain amount of time, will be voluntarily done. The authorities will then send them a code and ask them to register this code in the portal. After that, they will be officially registered.
Another method of registration will be the usual direct one — contacting Albanian consulates abroad in order to register.
Such a project will also help the government to create more facilities for them in relation to legal aid, health and education, according to the authorities, also adding that will also ease voting rights.
It will also facilitate much of the work or documentation that immigrants often want to have in their homeland.
Prime Minister Edi Rama said Albanians outside the country will no longer be treated as foreign citizens, adding that in two years, the government aims to register all nonresidents.
It is believed that about one million Albanians are estimated to be living in Greece and a smaller number are residents of Italy. Many Albanians also live in other European and North American countries.
More than one-third of the country’s citizens now live abroad.
