Young people and migration

3.4 million Romanians left the country between 2007 and 2017, according to official reports.

Christine Leșcu, 30.01.2019, 12:37

From 2007, when Romania joined the European Union, until 2017, 3.4 million Romanians had left the country, which accounts for almost 17% of its population. These official data place
Romania on 2nd position in a classification rating the growth rate
of a country’s Diaspora, after Syria, which tops the ranking, being a country that
has been faced with a civil war for several years now. This is the situation at
present, but the future does not seem to be different. Another survey confirms
what people have been discussing at informal level, namely that young people
themselves intend to migrate.

The Youth Mobility international
study has processed the data of a survey conducted among 30 thousand young people
from 9 EU countries: Germany, Sweden, Great Britain, Ireland, Slovakia, Latvia,
Italy, Spain and Romania. 2 thousand people from Romania participated in this
survey conducted in late 2015 and the early 2016. The conclusion, which is
still valid today, is that almost half of Romania’s young people aged between 16
and 35 would like to emigrate. University professor Dumitru Sandu from the
Faculty of Sociology of the Bucharest University has also contributed to the
research:

They don’t just wish to leave the
country, they have made concrete plans for leaving. Wishing to leave the
country is one thing, because wishes may be different in terms of intensity and
degrees of structuring the future, and we are not working with instruments
investigating people’s wishes. We look deeper into an issue. Thus, 47% of young
people in Romania in the 16 to 35 age bracket had clear intentions, even plans to
leave the country in the following 5 years at the time the survey was conducted.

This comes as no surprise for the
public opinion in Romania. However, surprises emerge when we start making comparisons
with other countries. For instance, in terms of reasons for leaving the
country, Romanians are quite similar with Italians. Professor Dumitru Sandu
explains:

The list of reasons is long. Top of
the list are always pay, jobs and wellbeing. And there are more reasons. A
common reason for both Romanians and Italians is corruption and poor working of
public administration. At present, situations and motivations are different, so
it’s better to rely on what we know better. Let’s take the situation of
physicians. Since their main reasons for leaving Romania are economic, one
would expect that the pay rise they have received recently could be regarded as
a first step in the process of preventing them from leaving. But this doesn’t work
like this. Of course, salaries have only recently been raised, and partial data
in the research show something different: the gap between the private and public
sector has deepened, and private sector physicians want to have similar
salaries with those in the state-run system. If they can’t have them in
Romania, they can always go abroad. In this equation we should also introduce
the stabilisation factor, of stabilising qualified young people. Other factors
to be introduced should be the quality of the working environment and of professional
life, and this is also valid for other domains of activity, besides medicine. Young
people want good working conditions and professional promotion based on merit,
like in other parts of Europe.

The discussions held by professor
Dumitru Sandu with the 2 thousand young Romanians who participated in the Youth
Mobility survey also tackled the idea of returning to Romania after working
abroad:

If we think of the issue of youth
brain drain only in economic terms, we’ll never fix this issue. For the survey
I talked to 2 thousand young people, some of whom had returned from abroad. I
asked them why they had left in the first place, when they first left the
country and how frequently they left. Furthermore, when you compare life experiences
that lead to migration in the 9 countries, you can see that in Romania what
matters is previous experience abroad. Ordinary Romanians, both young and old,
are influenced a lot in their intentions to leave the country by what they did before.
Migration is circular.

Referred to in expert studies as ‘Euro-commuting’,
circular migration is a temporary, usually repetitive movement of migrant
workers between home and host areas, for the purpose of employment. Commuting
is only possible based on binding labour contracts. Comparison with other
countries can also shed light on other aspects of migration for employment
purposes: the possibility and the conditions for returning home. Here is
professor Dumitru Sandu again:

As shown by other studies, a major
difference between ordinary Romanians and for example Poles who choose to migrate,
is that Poles leave on the basis of contracts or collaboration agreements with
an institution, which are more favourable to circular migration. Romanians,
however, choose family connections when they go abroad. If we compare a regular
Romanian migrant with a Swede or German migrant, the latter return home because
they have reached their goal. Romanians return home because they have to, they
return because they are sick or a relative is sick, because they get a divorce
or they come to visit the kids they left behind. Their return is dependent on
certain factors, so they don’t return home frequently.

Institutionalising circular
migration could be a solution for the return, at least temporary, of the young
people who leave the country with the wish to return at some point in the
future, who don’t want to lose their roots completely. Here is professor
Dumitru Sandu with more:

They leave the country with the thought
of returning in certain conditions. They keep monitoring the situation in the
country and make a final decision to return based on this monitoring and
comparison with the Western countries. Moreover, ordinary people adapt their behaviour
not only according to objective indicators but also to subjective indicators,
such as confidence. They speak of confidence or trust in Parliament, government
and other public or private institutions. Another side of the issue is that
young Romanians, both those living in Romania and abroad, show a higher degree
of mistrust in public institutions, more precisely in Romania’s public
administration.

Thus, the main reason for young
people’s return to their home country, besides the reasons specific to
Euro-commuting, is actually related to the developments in the country and the
changes to the existing situation.