Visa Regime Fails to Keep Balkan Immigrants at Bay

The queues start outside Western embassies each morning in the Macedonian capital, Skopje; local people, desperate to visit relatives or meet business partners, seeking visas to the European Union.

But while they wait patiently in line to plead before consular officials, others are bypassing these official channels entirely and making their way to work illegally in the EU. As long as Balkan economies remain weak, incentives to enter the West by any means are strong, especially when many employers there are happy to risk tough penalties for taking on black-market labour.

The persistence of the problem prompts many experts to question whether there is much point to the EU visa system, especially for the countries of the Western Balkans, whose citizens now form only a small proportion of illegal immigrants. This is partly thanks to progress made in those countries to improve border security – Macedonian police action, for example, meant 65 people-smugglers were jailed this year alone.

Such efforts were rewarded in September with a “visa facilitation” agreement, whose purpose is to ease European travel for Albanian, Bosnian, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Serbian nationals. But its provisions only go so far, and these countries are pressing for an even more liberal regime. Until this is granted, travel to the EU remains a trial for their citizens, with consequences for the region and Europe as a whole.

As Doris Pack, a member of the European Parliament and Balkan specialist, points out, “Almost 80 per cent of young citizens of Southeast Europe have never been in the EU, so how can they have a European vision?”

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