Romania Looks to Diaspora to Fill Labour Shortage

• Amid a growing lack of workers, Romanian lawmakers are set to discuss allowing companies to employ ethnic Romanians from countries like Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine, balkaninsight.com reads.

Romania’s parliament is to discuss a bill that would allow ethnic Romanians from non-EU countries in the Balkans to get jobs in Romania more easily than other non-EU citizens, to meet a growing labour shortage.

MPs from a number of parties submitted the bill to the Senate last week. It must now be discussed by parliamentary commissions and in plenary sessions.

The bill would permit ethnic Romanians who do not have Romanian or other EU citizenship, from states with large Romanian communities such as Ukraine, Serbia and Moldova, to work for up to one year without a work permit.

The initiators of the bill, Popular Movement Party MPs Constantin Codreanu and Petru Movila, say Romanian entrepreneurs should be entitled to avoid the costly and time-consuming procedures of approval from the General Immigration Inspectorate of the Ministry of Interior in the case of workers from non-EU countries.

Romania has had some controversies with its neighbours over the rights of its ethnic minorities.

Romanians are the third largest ethnic group in Ukraine. The government estimates that around 400,000 ethnic Romanians live in the Cernauti and Transcarpatia areas in north-west Ukraine and in the Odessa area, in south-west Ukraine.

However, most of those in the south-west, 258,000 during the 2001 census, identified as Moldovans, and the government in Kiev treats them as such.

Serbia is officially home to around 30,000 Romanians who mostly reside in Vojvodina and the Banat region. However, Romania considers around 35,000 people in the Timocka Krajina region on the border with Bulgaria also Romanian because their language is close to Romanian. Serbia, however, identifies them as Vlachs and does not allow their language to be used in administration, despite Romanian pressure.

In Albania, the 2012 census identified 8,200 residents as Aromanians, though the 2003 Demographic Atlas of Albania counted 140,000 people in this ethnic group.

However, Albania does not recognise the Aromanians as a national minority, but only as an ethic and linguistic minority, which means that Tirana does not acknowledge a connection between them and Romania.

In Moldova, ethnicity has a political meaning, and only 7 per cent of its citizens identify as Romanians, while 75 per cent say they are Moldovans. However, 800,000 out of 3.5 million people in Moldova had Romanian citizenship in 2017.   

Romania, with a population of 19 million at the latest census in 2011, has faced a growing labour crisis in recent years, mainly due to people leaving to work in other EU states.

UN data released in February 2018 said almost 3.4 million Romanians left during 2007-2017, most for better wages. Almost 30,000 Romanians acquired citizenship of other EU states only in 2016, Eurostat data showed.

Government statistics released on Monday say 5 million people are now in work in the country, compared to 8 million in 1990.  

While entrepreneurs and specialists say the country needs tens of thousands of workers, Romania imported only 5,000 employees from non-EU countries in 2017. Most came from Vietnam, 1,400 people, three times the number in 2016. The rest came from Turkey, China, Serbia and Sri Lanka.

The government in January 2018 approved a quota of 7,000 foreign non-EU workers.

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