The Balkans’ grim demographics
Studies show alarming trend of immigration from the Balkans as young people give up hope of a decent livelihood
It’s a great day for Kevi, a young waiter at a cafe that’s popular among the diplomats working at the foreign embassies flanking Skenderbeu Street in downtown Tirana.
“I’m finally leaving! I’m going to Germany,” he tells a regular customer, insisting on treating him to his usual coffee. He’s been looking for a way to emigrate to Western Europe for years but it’s not easy, without a European Union passport, to secure a work permit in any member-state. He finally managed to find a way in by doing what so many other of his fellow Albanians have done: He contacted a racket which, for a fee of 13,000 euros, arranged a sham marriage with a young woman from Bulgaria, which secured him the documents he needs to travel to Germany and work as a truck driver. Sham marriages are just one of many different ruses that are popular in Albania – and beyond – for getting the papers needed to relocate to an EU member-state and, more importantly, secure work.
Another method entails connecting with drug smuggling gangs that take Albanians to Italy by boat and from there transport them to Germany, the Netherlands and elsewhere, including the UK, where they are forced to work at cannabis plantations and deal drugs in order to pay off their fare.
According to the 2024 report of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Albania and Moldova account for the highest rate of immigration to Europe. Even more specifically, it notes that 40% of Albania’s workforce is employed abroad. It is also worth noting that according to the censuses of 2011 and 2023, Albania’s population has shrunk by 420,000.
Moldova is experiencing similar problems, the IOM report notes, adding that this trend increased after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and as a result of the ensuing cost-of-living crisis, which forced even more citizens to look abroad for security and opportunities. From a population of 5 million at independence from the Soviet Union, Moldova has plummeted to under 2.5 million, while fears of an invasion similar to that in Ukraine have accelerated the flight trend.
But it is not just Albania and Moldova that are facing the specter of mass immigration. The entire Balkan region, and the Western Balkans in particular, is emptying of people as citizens lose hope of securing a decent way of life in their country.
In Serbia, for example, 72% of young men and women believe they live in a “structurally corrupt” country and nearly half of them want to leave as soon as possible, according to a report by the United Nations, which notes that the country’s population is shrinking by the equivalent of a town every year. Indeed, some 50,000 Serbs leave the country on an annual basis, according to official figures.
The situation is even worse in Bosnia-Herzegovina, whose population shrank by 10% in a decade, but also in Kosovo and EU member-state Bulgaria. Even in Croatia, 370,000 citizens left the country within the first eight years of its induction into the EU, with 40% of the migrants saying they never plan to go back and 45% hoping to return after retirement.
The UN’s forecasts for the future are extremely alarming for Bosnia, which is expected to lose 60% of its residents in the next 50 years, and especially for Albania, which is looking at a 66% decline by the end of the century if current trends continue.
You don’t need official reports to perceive the scope of the problem, however. “I had around 100 students in 2010; now there are barely 10,” says a teacher from Kosovo.
There are also major shortages of labor in areas like agriculture, tourism and transport, and foreign workers are being brought in from Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.
In a bid to stem the outflow, the EU instituted three-month tourist visas for the Western Balkans, mainly, a few years ago. The measure did not reverse the trend, however, as the citizens of those countries were not interested in traveling for leisure but in finding work. The result was that many stayed on after their visas expired and looked for work illegally.
“If the flight continues, only civil servants, criminals and pensioners will be left in the end. How can a state possibly function in these circumstances?” one Albanian analyst recently noted.
