Romania Looks to Diaspora to Fill Labour Shortage

Romania's parliament is to discuss a bill that would allow ethnic Romanians from non-EU countries in the Balkans to get jobs in Romania more easily than other non-EU citizens, to meet a growing labour shortage.

MPs from a number of parties submitted the bill to the Senate last week. It must now be discussed by parliamentary commissions and in plenary sessions.

The bill would permit ethnic Romanians who do not have Romanian or other EU citizenship, from states with large Romanian communities such as Ukraine, Serbia and Moldova, to work for up to one year without a work permit.

The initiators of the bill, Popular Movement Party MPs Constantin Codreanu and Petru Movila, say Romanian entrepreneurs should be entitled to avoid the costly and time-consuming procedures of approval from the General Immigration Inspectorate of the Ministry of Interior in the case of workers from non-EU countries.

Romania has had some controversies with its neighbours over the rights of its ethnic minorities.

Romanians are the third largest ethnic group in Ukraine. The government estimates that around 400,000 ethnic Romanians live in the Cernauti and Transcarpatia areas in north-west Ukraine and in the Odessa area, in south-west Ukraine.

However, most of those in the south-west, 258,000 during the 2001 census, identified as Moldovans, and the government in Kiev treats them as such.

Serbia is officially home to around 30,000 Romanians who mostly reside in Vojvodina and the Banat region. However, Romania considers around 35,000 people in the Timocka Krajina region on the border with Bulgaria also Romanian because their language is close to Romanian. Serbia, however, identifies them as Vlachs and does not allow their language to be used in...