Europe Keeps Door to Poor Albanians Closely Guarded

The relaxation of the European Union’s visa rules with several Balkan states, agreed on September 18, 2007, has been widely welcomed. Middle-class entrepreneurs, students and academics will now be relieved of many of the frustrations that once bedevilled their planned holidays and business trips.

But poor and unskilled families, like the Palijas, of Shkoder, northern Albania, won’t benefit from the changes, even though, ironically, their need to travel is arguably far more urgent; for them it is a question of survival.

When Albania’s Communist regime collapsed, ending 50 years of isolation from the outside world, the economy imploded. Left with nothing, almost everyone wanted out. Migration pressure remains strong to this day, with unemployment high and the state weak and unreliable.

For the vast majority of the approximately one million of Albania’s 4 million citizens who live abroad, travel is not a lifestyle choice but the only escape route from a life of grinding poverty. Older relatives that remain behind depend on the precious remittances sent by sons performing low-paid manual jobs in Italy, or from daughters married to Albanians living in the United States.

While the emerging middle class of Albanians spreads it wings in Europe as a result of the change in the visa rules, the Palijas only dream of the day when they will be able to visit their children abroad without resorting to the twilight world of people smugglers and illegality.

“The middle class has already had some access to move around,” says Kosta Bajraba, a political scientist working for the Albanian government. “It is the low-skilled with no connections who need it more and who will find it harder.”

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