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