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    Emigration

    I thought we had a thread on this a while back but searching has not helped me locate one...

    This article claims that the number of people who have emigrated from Romania in the last 10 years is 3.4 million, or 17% of the population. This according to the UN's figures puts Romania in second place in the world for emigration behind...Syria. [There are some doubts over the figures and some argue that many of those people have gone away for a short time, and the actual figure of emigrants is something like a mere 2 million]. Whatever the truth, it is clear that we have a massive problem. And it cuts across all aspects of society - from not having enough doctors to local restaurants closing because they can't get waitstaff. Whole villages are empty, and in some rural parts of the country you rarely see anyone aged between 16 and 40.

    The article also notes that we have an incredibly low level of immigration - currently 117,000 foreigners (hi!), of whom 3900 are refugees or similar.

    It seems that there is a lot of discussion in the international media over the issues associated with immigration, but far less discussion of the issues associated with emigration, which are huge and much more prone to rip society apart.

    #2
    I cycled through Transylvania in 2003 (Jimbolia to Sighisoara) and we were struck by the number of empty villages on outr route. We were told that there were a lot of ethnic Germans who had moved to Germany itself following an edict to allow them to emigrate. I'm not sure whether that has anything to do with it. Also, free movement of goods, people and services within the EU will have an effect on both the receiving and sending state.

    It also has a massive effect on the ability of developing nations (here in East Africa certainly) to keep their best people and plan for the future. The UK took nearly all available nurses from Zimbabawe a while back, as far as I remember.

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      #3
      Originally posted by Vicarious Thrillseeker View Post
      I cycled through Transylvania in 2003 (Jimbolia to Sighisoara) and we were struck by the number of empty villages on outr route. We were told that there were a lot of ethnic Germans who had moved to Germany itself following an edict to allow them to emigrate. I'm not sure whether that has anything to do with it.
      No the Germans all left in the 80s and 90s, there are virtually no ethnic German Romanians left now (except for the President). [Essentially Ceausescu sold them to West Germany - the FRG offered money to Romania for them to be allowed to leave, which Ceausescu was happy to accept]. They will have had pretty much no effect on the number of people leaving between 2007 and 2017

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        #4
        Welcome to Ireland 1850-1990.

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          #5
          Can rural depopulation, i.e. the movement of people from the countryside to towns and cities, while staying inside the same nation state, be regarded as a subset of emigration and its associated problems here?

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            #6
            ad hoc, if you were pitching Romania to a prospect, what would you say about it?

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              #7
              Originally posted by Furtho View Post
              Can rural depopulation, i.e. the movement of people from the countryside to towns and cities, while staying inside the same nation state, be regarded as a subset of emigration and its associated problems here?
              i think it can, although the most obvious difference is that when people move to the cities, their extended families tend to stay where they are, ensuring a continued connection with their "home". Here, there may be visits for a week in summer, but those ties are rapidly lost. And then there is also chain migration with the diaspora which seems to be less common in the movement to urban centres

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                #8
                Originally posted by WOM View Post
                ad hoc, if you were pitching Romania to a prospect, what would you say about it?
                Can you say what you mean by a prospect here? Investor? Immigrant? Tourist? I'm not quite sure.

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                  #9
                  It looks Fucking amazing. The RTE holiday show did an hour long special from transylvania. Jesus fucking christ but it's beautiful.

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                    #10
                    It really is. Stunning

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                      #11
                      Originally posted by ad hoc View Post
                      Can you say what you mean by a prospect here? Investor? Immigrant? Tourist? I'm not quite sure.
                      Um. Let's say 'voluntary immigrant'. I guess it's a tough question, now that I give it more thought.

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                        #12
                        OK, and pitching means I ignore all the negative stuff right?

                        It's a beautiful country as TAB says, it has a thriving and vibrant and growing young urban middle class, it's tech friendly and has a lot of tech industry and a lot of very well qualified and expert people (and infrastructure things like fast internet speeds). Property is very very cheap. It's in the European Union and fairly well connected by air.

                        That sort of thing?

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                          #13
                          It's got a beautiful sounding language. Oh, and I now have a Romanian next door Neighbour. She and her husband (an American) work in the University here. They seem very nice, though I only met them briefly, when trying to rescue my other neighbours sadly demented cat, (Who was basically on his last trip outside before a final journey to the vet) from the engine compartment of her car.

                          Between the Romanian and American living on one side, the Nigerian family on the other side of the hedge, The Angolan family three doors Down and Eoin across the road, who is himself half french, and his greek cypriot wife, from Haringay, I must say that suburban cul de sac life in Galway is a lot more cosmopolitan than I expected. Even the Cat was from Cyprus, and 17 bloody years old.

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                            #14
                            I keep on thinking I must go to visit the Carpathians and Transylvania, what with my fondness for hiking up the hills...and turn up at Ad Hoc's to try his plum spirit...

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                              #15
                              Originally posted by ad hoc View Post
                              OK, and pitching means I ignore all the negative stuff right?

                              It's a beautiful country as TAB says, it has a thriving and vibrant and growing young urban middle class, it's tech friendly and has a lot of tech industry and a lot of very well qualified and expert people (and infrastructure things like fast internet speeds). Property is very very cheap. It's in the European Union and fairly well connected by air.

                              That sort of thing?
                              Yeah, that's the idea. I mean, I'm obviously far removed geographically, so I know very little about it. But if I had to make a short list of countries to move to, it wouldn't occur to me to include Romania. Or, you know, places like Latvia or Lithuania or such. The Nordic countries would be a no-brainer, as would France and Germany and the like.

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                                #16
                                Another changing factor is how far west the emigrants go. It used to be mainly to Germany or Hungary but now, I suspect, they often go farther afield. OTOH Poland, Ukraine and Russia still have numerically largely diaspora populations, but I don't know about comparable percentages.

                                I imagine that Rumania has suffered from being squeezed for centuries between German and Russian imperialism, and the madness of two tyrants (Antonescu, Ceausescu).

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                                  #17
                                  Evidently Romania has featured on at least one episode of International House Hunters recently

                                  I would add it having a Romance language as a draw.

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                                    #18
                                    It's difficult to get a good proxy for how rich a country is, but I think that this is basically the best one you can use. It takes into account the size of the economy, the population, and the local price levels, and compares it to the EU Average.

                                    This chart goes a long way to explaining migration within the EU. It's a chart of GDP per capita in each EU country, adjusted for local prices, relative to the European average. from 2006 to 2016. I draw your attention to the trajectory of Romania, (From 39% of the EU average to 58%) Lithuania (55% to 75%) Poland (51%-68%) Estonia (64%-75%) Latvia (53%-65) Slovakia (63-77%) Czech republic (79%-88%) You can already see the rates of migration from East to west dropping fairly meaningfully simply because there's less need. (this covers about 80 million people) One thing to notice about this level of catching up, is that by catching up with the EU average, they were pushing the EU average up as they were chasing it. Things aren't going so well in hungary [ 61-67%] and bulgaria [38%-49%] croatia [58%-59%]


                                    It's also interesting to look at Italy (108-97) the UK (116-107) France (109-104) Spain (103- 92) (this alone covers 240 million people, or a little over half of the EU) These economies are not having a good time. then Throw in Greece [96%-68%] and cyprus [100%-83%] Portugal [83%-77%] and you can see that it wasn't a great decade for a lot of the old EU 15.

                                    The thing is that if Romania doesn't get fucked out of the EU, for shit Ireland had gotten out of its system by the time we joined, the trajectory for them is falling emigration, that fluctuates inversely with the growth rate, until eventually they catch up with Italy, at which point there will be no point in moving there, and a lot of emigrants, or the children of emigrants will return. It's not clear what the future for romanians in the UK is, but I suspect that a lot of them better start brushing up on their german.

                                    The challenge for Romania really is to make sure that their scumbag politicians don't fuck everything up, and have the sense to realize that if they don't get too greedy, they can skim off a smaller slice of a vastly bigger pie.

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                                      #19
                                      Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View Post
                                      It looks Fucking amazing. The RTE holiday show did an hour long special from transylvania. Jesus fucking christ but it's beautiful
                                      I think I saw that- the show presented by Mairead Ronan and Vogue Williams with Nordie cameos from rugby star Tommy Bowe and hipster beard Joe Lindsay? Cluj Napoca and Sighisoara looked good

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                                        #20
                                        Originally posted by Moonlight shadow View Post
                                        I keep on thinking I must go to visit the Carpathians and Transylvania, what with my fondness for hiking up the hills...and turn up at Ad Hoc's to try his plum spirit...
                                        You know you're welcome Yuri

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                                          #21
                                          Originally posted by Satchmo Distel View Post
                                          Another changing factor is how far west the emigrants go. It used to be mainly to Germany or Hungary but now, I suspect, they often go farther afield. OTOH Poland, Ukraine and Russia still have numerically largely diaspora populations, but I don't know about comparable percentages.
                                          The vast majority are in Spain and Italy.

                                          I imagine that Rumania has suffered from being squeezed for centuries between German and Russian imperialism, and the madness of two tyrants (Antonescu, Ceausescu).
                                          Romania is only a very recent concept so it's difficult to argue it's suffered for centuries. And to German imperialism only between 1940 & 1944.

                                          What we know as Romania really fell between Austro-Hungary, the Ottomans and Russia

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                                            #22
                                            Originally posted by Duncan Gardner View Post
                                            I think I saw that- the show presented by Mairead Ronan and Vogue Williams with Nordie cameos from rugby star Tommy Bowe and hipster beard Joe Lindsay? Cluj Napoca and Sighisoara looked good
                                            How the hell do you know all their names? Tommy Bowe is so fucking hilariously bad, he makes Vogue Williams look like David Attenborough. Apparently Tommy Is one of those lads who has always good at rugby, and being gorgeous, and no-one has yet told him that he can't do something. So we get to watch this.

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                                              #23
                                              I watch it every week

                                              Mairead: "So I'm off for a helicopter ride over Dracula's castle- we'll cut to Tommy and Joe biking around Kilkeel in the pouring rain"
                                              Last edited by Duncan Gardner; 27-02-2018, 16:20.

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                                                #24
                                                In Hungary last week speaking to a friend who runs a small construction business (private houses, renovations etc). He's thinking of packing it in, because he can't find the skilled workers he needs. People are giving him work, but he can no longer find brick layers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers etc to actually carry it out. Every time he locates a new crew, half of them leave. He's having to turn work down and this is happening everywhere across the region. The economy is totally stagnating. Also heard of restaurants in Balaton, which has a shortish summer season, which can't find chefs. Unless you pay them massive wages, they just won't come. There's also a Samsung factory in northern Hungary which is staffed almost entirely by Ukrainians - every morning they have a 3 hour bus journey to work (including significant border crossing time) and 3 hours back in the evening. Every single day.

                                                I look at the table that TAB linked to a few months ago (which has been updated since then) and see the GDP of these countries getting closer to the mean, but I suspect it doesn't tell the whole story. Much of the GDP of Romania comes from money being sent home from Spain/Italy/the UK etc. There is a thriving economy in cities such as Bucharest and Cluj, but in general Romania is very rural and the rural parts of the country and small towns are not growing at all. To me it seems the only hope for the economies and the futures of places like Romania is to actually create a sensible and progressive policy on admitting immigrants. But of course this is the part of Europe least likely to do that...

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                                                  #25
                                                  It also cuts into the Kipperish argument sometimes advanced that free movement is knackering 'home' economies as well as 'host' economies so the EU is terrible.
                                                  Not saying that's the point you're making, mind.

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