Le Monde analysis, taken over by Rador Radio Romania:
Once closed to all forms of immigration, the country, like most of Central and Eastern Europe, has been opening up to foreigners for several years under pressure from employers who complain about labor shortages.
With its 1,100 beds spread over three buildings, the worker’s dormitory in the Komitat Bucharest Sud neighborhood is a true mix of cultures. Nepalese, Indians, Bengalis, Sri Lankans… Immigrants from Asia continuously enter and leave the dormitories equipped with video cameras and security, installed in a residential suburb of the Romanian capital. “I arrived here six months ago to work for [livratorul] Glovo,” Naresh Chaudhary, a 38-year-old Nepali man, tells us between two calls to his mother at home, from the room he shares with three other Nepalis.
The young man claims that he earns twice as much as in Nepal for delivering hot meals to the people of Bucharest, who gradually got used to these delivery people who do not speak a word of Romanian. “This is my first time coming here,” explains Chaudhary, who has previously visited Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. Like all his roommates, he landed in Bucharest “thanks to a recruitment agency” in this Eastern European country which is facing a glaring labor shortage due to the departure of millions of inhabitants to Western Europe after accession to the European Union in 2007.
Next to him, another Nepali, Sherpa Pemba, 32, also admits he had never heard of Romania before arriving here, but says “Romanians are nice”, although he quickly became disillusioned with the conditions his work. Even though he works more than eleven hours a day for Glovo, he says he never manages to get enough deliveries to exceed the minimum required by his employer. “I still haven’t been able to send money to my family,” he complains, despite the contract that guaranteed him a monthly salary of 550 euros.
The labor force problem
“They should spend more time in the city center to receive more orders,” says Valeriu Nicolae, director of the hostel, to justify these complaints which would be “isolated cases” among the more than 120,000 non-European foreigners who live now in Romania. This former diplomat had flair when he founded, in 2016, the private hostel company Komitat, which offers Romanian companies accommodation for their workers for only 6 euros per night. Komitat now provides accommodation for more than 4,000 workers, mostly Asian, who work mainly “in Marriott hotels, McDonald’s or Delhaize supermarkets /Mega Image, n. trans/”.
For a long time completely closed to any form of immigration, Romania, like most countries in central and eastern Europe, has actually opened up to foreigners for several years, under pressure from employers who complain of difficulties in recruiting staff, accentuated by the post- Covid. “With 6 million Romanians working abroad and a declining birthrate, we have a serious labor problem for our economy,” recalls Romulus Badea, a partner at Soter, a tax firm that has developed a thriving international recruitment business to meet their needs.
This lawyer constantly travels around Asia in search of workers, “known for their flexibility and understanding of the work culture”, and who can expect to earn four to five times more by immigrating to Romania – even if the local minimum wage does not exceed 660 euros crude.
“The recruitment crisis is such that we even brought in three Nepalis ready to work as shepherds to watch over the flocks of sheep,” he says. “We are entering a process that took place in Western Europe several decades ago”, declares Sorin-Mihai Grindeanu, the vice-president of the ruling Social Democratic Party and Minister of Transport, who believes that “especially the construction companies are very happy ” with this workforce.
Even though the country has had almost no non-European foreign workers so far, the topic of immigration does not make much waves in society, beyond a few isolated acts of racism. “In the big cities, Romanians are prepared /for such a reality/”, said the minister.
The spokesperson of the right-wing nationalist party Alliance for Romanian Unity, deputy Dan Tănașa, denounces the “uncontrolled immigration that arrives in Romania”. But the rejection of immigrants is far from the main campaign message of this party in view of the European elections on June 9.
Behind the facade messages urging Romanians in the diaspora to return, most of the political class seems to have come to terms with the idea that this will never happen. “When I met Romanians living in Italy, I asked them why they don’t return, now that salaries are almost the same between our two countries in the construction sector. They told me that they left twenty years ago, and their children have now become little Italians”, Grindeanu tells us, who does not rule out that the same process will happen, one day, to the newly arrived Sri Lankans and Nepalese.
This new immigration allowed the country to return, in 2022, to demographic growth – for the first time since the end of communism. For now, however, very few Asians dare to actually settle here, bringing their families with them. A significant part of them openly dreams of going a little further west.
“We lost a lot of Sri Lankans and Vietnamese, who preferred to leave illegally, especially to Portugal,” complains Radu Dimitrescu, head of a group of luxury restaurants in the capital, which now has only twenty foreign employees, because many of them disappeared to work illegally elsewhere in the European Union.
Romania’s entry into the Schengen area on March 31 could further strengthen this trend, as a result of the elimination of all border controls.
But despite all these limitations, a small community of Asians is shaping up to be permanent. Sam Fernando, for example, arrived from Sri Lanka in 2019 to work as a bartender before retraining as a car mechanic due to the Covid-19 crisis. Now employed in a garage, this jovial mechanic earns up to 4,000 lei (800 euros) a month, and has taken up the habit of “participating in fishing sessions” with his colleagues who speak Romanian, a language he is starting to learn it well.
“Of course, there are countries where you can earn a better living, but I like it here,” justifies the thirty-year-old, who convinced two other fellow citizens to follow him. One of them is a musician in his spare time. In September 2023, his band, called “RO94” – for “Romania” and the telephone code of his country, Sri Lanka (+94) – held the first concert of Sri Lankan music in the history of Romania, in a Bucharest hall packed with compatriots.
Author: Jean-Baptiste Chastand / Translation: Ruxandra Lambru
