On December 23, Group for Legal and Political Studies (GLPS) organized a Press Conference on the topic: “Migrant’s Profile 2.0: Who are the citizens more likely to migrate?” held in Prishtina. During this conference, GLPS presented a Policy Analysis titled: “Potential Migrant’s Profile: who are the citizens most likely to migrate?” The Analysis aims to construct the potential migrant’s profile in Kosovo, and identify main characteristics of citizens willing to migrate by updating the potential migrant’s profile published in 2015. In addition, it also portrays the level of education, regions and age groups most willing to migrate from Kosovo. To do this, GLPS conducted two sets of surveys conducted in December 2019 and June 2020. This analysis comes at a time when Kosovo is facing an extraordinary situation of a health, political and socio-economic crisis. The survey conducted in June 2020 allows us to assess whether the blockage and the consequences of the pandemic have affected the willingness of citizens to migrate. That said, this analysis also aims to provide a comparative approach by identifying any changes in migrant readiness and migrant profile before and after the pandemic. A particular characteristic of the recent survey (2020) is the inclusion of questions related to the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to assess whether the consequences of the pandemic have affected citizens’ willingness to migrate, remittances and employment.

“The survey data show a concerning result regarding the willingness to migrate with the highest percentage report from all survey waves conducted, and even higher than that of 2015 when Kosovo was experiencing a large wave of migration. More precisely, 48.4% of respondents are willing to migrate. Willingness to migrate has increased by 23% and 30% in 2020, compared to 2015 and 2019, respectively”, stated Arberesha Loxha Stublla, Executive Director at GLPS.

One a more positive note, it seems that the high willingness to migrate is not necessarily translated into illegal migration as the EUROSTAT statistics suggest that the number of asylum seekers in the EU states and other Schengen countries has dropped significantly in 2019. The data suggests that the number of asylum seekers has decreased significantly compared to 2015, from 73,240 applications in 2015 to 2,355 in 2019.

In addition, our June 2020 survey data suggests that the main reasons why citizens are willing to migrate remain more or less the same. One of the most listed reasons that would push individuals to migrate is the lack of hope that the economic, political and social situation will improve. Similarly, most respondents who are willing to migrate blame the government and political parties for their willingness to migrate in 2020, clearly portraying the failure of public institutions and political elites to meet the expectations of citizens and address their concerns.

Although the pandemic does not seem to have affected the flow of remittances, almost two in ten respondents claim that their employment situation has changed since the beginning of the pandemic (19.1%), of whom over half have not received a salary ( 58.8%) and almost a quarter has seen their salary reduced (20.9%). Nearly 16 percent of respondents said they had lost their job. Against this backdrop, only 18.7 percent of all respondents have benefited from the emergency package.

Speakers:

Ms. Arbëresha Loxha Stublla – Executive Director, GLPS;

Ms. Njomza Arifi – Programme Manager, GLPS.

For more detailed information, please read our policy analysis, while infographics in Albanian can be found here.