[Albania] New study: What drives Albanian asylum seekers

Within last years, from 2010 to September 2019, nearly 193,000 Albanian citizens applied for asylum in EU countries. The phenomenon reached its highest points in 2015 when 67,000 Albanians applied for asylum that year alone. Acceptance rates are low, but still, a great number of Albanians apply for asylum every month. Albania is in fact, fourth in the world and the first in Europe for asylum requests.

A study report entitled “Albanian returned asylum seekers: Reintegration or re-emigration” supervised by Ilir Gedeshi from the Centre for Economic and Social Studies and Russell King Professor of Geography at the University of Sussex in the UK, studied why people leave and what the prospects are when they return.

Some of the main findings of the reported are:

Almost 65% of respondents said they do not have sufficient incomes to meet the needs of daily life. They mostly rely on the work of family members and social assistance.
More than a third of those surveyed are long-term unemployed.
34% of working interviewees, carry out unskilled work in the informal sector.
Most of the return asylum seekers are younger and have elderly family members that depend on them.
In the case of married asylum seekers often the man will go first with the intention that the wife and children will follow later.
Main asylum reasons are poverty, unemployment, underemployment, low wages, difficult living conditions, limited social protection, and lack of education opportunities.
The lack of proper healthcare is also a driving factor.
Between the mentioned leaving factors in suburban and rural areas is the lack of nurseries and full-day serving kindergartens.
Blood feuds were also another reason for leaving, while the government does not provide the true prevalence, they still impact around 3000 families in the country. Also young people and children are at risk of revenge.
Roma respondents said that they left due to problems with housing, state demolition of their homes, due to discrimination, lack of help from the police, refusal of healthcare and various other issues.
Those who return might have an easy social integration but there struggle to find work.
Many returned asylum seeker will register with employment offices, while there is a lack of jobs and very low wages.
A number of the returned ones expressed their displeasure with the inefficiency and poor behaviour of the civil service of employment offices.
Roma when returning find it even harder to get jobs, despite having university diplomas.