Romania in/out: Migration – an economic problem or a cultural one?

At a first level of understanding, the problem of migration could be seen as one of big numbers and international rankings: in Europe, Russia is in first place, with 146 million inhabitants, Germany second, Turkey third; Romania is in 10th place, even after recent demographic declines. In the European Union, it is in 7th place, between Poland and the Netherlands. In the world, it is in 59th place, between Sri Lanka and Burkina Fasso. They are simple rankings, good at most for establishing the number of MEPs that Romania sends to Brussels.

But as solid as they may seem, the numbers reflect reality only to a certain extent. International migration is a complex phenomenon, not always legal, and the figures are based on estimates and reports (with political stakes) of some state and international bodies.

Double scale of statistics
In the whole complex of international migration, the countries of Eastern Europe really represent a special case. Since intra-community migration is no longer regulated, and the European Union lacks a minimum of centralization, the dynamics of the phenomenon are rather less transparent. Thus, in Romania, the official figures describing the phenomenon are stuck at a few hundred thousand. This is a hyperconservative interpretation, which only takes into account the population that processed the entire administrative process of changing residence and notified the Romanian authorities about it. 

Sources that take into account actual migration, beyond the formalization of relations with the administration, push the figure to several million. Traditionally, based on remittances (money sent to the country by emigrants), the total estimated by the World Bank and the National Bank of Romania is 3.5 million Romanians settled (semi)permanently abroad. It should be noted that only remittances made through financial bodies are monitored, not those directly or through the intermediation of non-banking mechanisms. 

The estimates made by the OECD, the United Nations, Eurostat or the databases dedicated to migration and demography offer figures quite different from each other, outlining the idea of ​​limited transparency. Indeed, there are actually abandoned localities and communes in Romania, and the effect of effective transparency would be the abolition of a large number of UATs (territorial administrative units) that have become unsustainable or completely depopulated. Also, if we were to operate with the real figures, the impact would be felt at the higher administrative levels, changing the vectors of public policies and the political balances in the local administration; on the other hand, requiring the necessary recalibration of the attention and interest given to Romanian citizens abroad – from the right to vote (currently calibrated for a few hundred thousand people, not for a few million, as the real migration represents) to consular assistance, supporting diaspora organizations and associativity, supporting transnational economic and cultural actions at acceptable levels. This is all the more so since, in addition to remittances (worth several million dollars a year, with a peak of almost 10 million in 2008), many of those who left pay some categories of taxes in Romania,

Operating with unrealistic statistical data, collected rigidly and out of time with the dynamics of social phenomena, is characteristic not only for international migration, but also for internal migration. Thus, many small towns and small administrative units in the countryside have, in their records, larger population than the real one, while large cities such as Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Iași, etc. have a larger effective population than the nominal one. Recently, the ex-mayor of Bucharest, Gabriela Firea, estimated the real population of the city to be at least 4 million, double the official figures.

The economic impact, the social substrate

Based on the data provided by Eurostat, with 3.6 million Romanians residing in other European Union states, Romania ranks first in the EU, followed by Poland, with 1.5 million emigrants, Italy, with 1.3 million, and Portugal, with 0.9 million. Not only the countries with the least performing economies are sources of this intra-community mobility, but also Great Britain, Germany, France or Spain, which occupy the next places in the ranking of mobility, each with over half a million emigrants. Thus, after the initial patterns, in which migration meant the transition from areas of low economic productivity to areas of high productivity, a gradual transition is made to the diversification of patterns, to the pursuit of opportunities specific to each area, tending towards balancing development and economic homogeneity at the level of the Eurozone. As far as Romania is concerned, the repeated postponement of the convergence and adoption calendar of the European currency will delay economic homogenization and the diversification of demographic flows.

Even under the conditions in which Romania is not a Schengen member and has not adopted the Euro currency, the characteristics of migration have changed significantly in the last 20 years. Prior to integration into the European Union, migration had a very high degree of vulnerability: cases of human trafficking, exploitation of women, exploitation of adults or forced labor were very numerous, placing Romania among the countries with the highest risk, along with the former Yugoslavia , Uruguay, Tanzania and Georgia. 

Free access to the labor market in some European countries, after 2007, reduced the vulnerability of migrants and cross-border crime related to them. However, the phenomena did not disappear entirely, according to the CDTC, which monitors global human trafficking.

In general, international migration data and studies based on them are motivated by economic and humanitarian needs. Acting in sometimes divergent directions, these monitoring vectors, as a rule, overshadow the other perspectives on this issue – the sociocultural ones in the first place, respectively those related to identity and those related to multiculturalism. / Text and image: Nicu Ilie

See the full article in Cultura magazine. Translated with the accord of the author. Rights reserved. Copyright: revistacultura.ro