Indexul Integrării Imigranților în România 2017

Last years brought about, again, the topic of migration to the mainstream Romanian media. The media rearticulated some themes that were already discussed and brought to the public attention in the past ten to fifteen years. When in 2002 Romanian citizens obtained visa-free agreement to the EU, the main theme was the large number of Romanians who have left the country. In 2007, when the country joined the EU as a member state, the discourse on migration was about anti-immigration debates in the Western Europe and the expulsion of Romanian citizens back to Romania. Today, the discourse revolves around the refugee crisis and the fact that Romania started to receive migrants and refugees, and that in the future it may host large amounts of Muslims. Most probably, this last topic will continue to stir up heated debates in the Romanian public space. According to various data, the number of international immigrants arriving in Romania is of about 370,000 people. This means that migrants make up about 2 % of the country’s population. Even though this number is not that high and it draws not much attention, it is still of utmost importance that Romania has started to develop migration policies and methods to measure migrants’ integration before facing large-scale migration. The current report and the index of migrants’ integration therein is such a measurement and it provides a general image of how migrants’ fare in Romania. It was constructed using other similar tools (MIPEX, Zaragoza indicators, and so on) and aims at adapting them to the Romanian context. It focuses on migration policy, labor market adaptation, and the relationship between migrants and the institutions dealing with immigrants’ integration. This synthetic data allows us to obtain a longitudinal image of immigrants’ integration, compare data from different regions and cities, as well as compare the Romanian data to the data from other older and newer countries of immigration. Such data on immigrants’ ...