Why Albanians come to Britain

A friend of mine works in a surgery in London where lots of asylum seekers go for treatment. The caseload is a snapshot of current trends in illegal immigration, and at present that means lots of Albanians. 

Yep, that’s the migrant influx across the Channel we’ve been hearing so much about, and which the Albanian PM, Edi Rama, has been blaming on the British government: 'It's not about Albanians or aliens or gangsters, but it's about failed policies on borders and on crime,' he said this week. 

Three cases give an idea of what’s going on. One patient was a nurse from Tirana, Albania's capital, but had found it impossible on a nurse’s wage to buy somewhere to live. She’s also rather a plain girl and her marriage prospects were slim. So she saved up her money to pay the people traffickers; the going rate to get to Britain starts around £3,000-4,000 and can go up to £10,000. Getting across Europe isn’t hard; it’s getting from France that’s the issue. 

Then there was a man from northern Albania who was wounded fighting with the KLA in Kosovo and nearly blind with diabetes; his son, aged 18 or so, was with him; he has serious health conditions which can’t properly be treated at home; besides, social welfare is more generous here. 

The third was a married couple with a young child from the south; the wife was a nurse. The cross-Channel journey in the dinghy was hell; there had been water up to their waists for what seemed like hours. But when the British boat – presumably the coastguard – arrived, everything changed. It was, like, she said, the promised land. The husband had a reason for wanting out of Albania; his family was involved in a blood feud. She was scared of the traffickers: terrorists, she called them. Certainly she wasn’t going to shop them; they’re here and if anyone gives them trouble, it would be tricky for their family back home. 

Are these legitimate asylum seekers in the sense of having a well founded fear of persecution? I’d say not, myself. But they’re not simply economic migrants either.  

Why leave Albania – parts of which are beautiful – for an unprepossessing bedsit in a dispiriting London borough? The experts I sounded out, friends and a friend of a friend, interestingly don’t focus primarily on the economy to explain the exodus – because it really is an exodus of the younger generation. Rather, it’s to do with Albania being a failed state: the absence of the rule of law, the sense that the place is being run by a corrupt coterie for its own benefit, the hopelessness about the prospects for change, the narco-economy. One recent paper put the number who’ve left the country since the advent of Edi Rama, the socialist prime minister, in 2013, at 700,000. If Rama wants to know what's really behind the exodus of Albanians, he could do worse than look in the mirror.

Romeo Gurakuqi, a conservative MP in Albania until he was dropped by his party at the last election, used to be terrifically idealistic about politics 20 years ago. He says flatly that the way Albania is governed doesn’t square with it being a member of Nato and a candidate for EU membership: 'The way of governance, arrogance, inequality, corruption, lack of control of the rule of law, lack of guarantee for the development of business and foreign investments in the country, have all increased the depression in society,' he says.

Albania is benefiting from some foreign investment. Turkey's president Erdogan is a close ally of Rama's; he's funding yet another mega mosque in Albania, as part of his grand project to revive Ottomanism. But this type of investment is unusual.

For most Albanians, says Gurakuqi, times are hard: 'Albanian society is in a deep depression, not only economic and social, but also a state of anxiety, insecurity about life, which extends to the lower and middle classes of society'.

Gurakuqi notes that many of the arrivals to the UK are from his own area, northern Albania; it’s discriminated against, he says, by a political class dominated by the south. He adds:

'Why do they only come to the UK? I think that they are spread all over continental Europe. They move freely because Albania is part of the Schengen agreement.  But they think the UK offers more opportunities.'

You could add to that other factors identified in a report by the German Konrad Adenauer Foundation in 2020. It points to the bizarre land reforms that followed the fall of the Hoxha regime in the early 1990s. The communists appropriated private property in 1945; when the regime fell, a new law – 7519 – recognised the ownership of the land by those farming it, while also recognising the land was confiscated. So, no one owns it until compensation is paid, and the compensation process takes forever. With little secure ownership, there’s no incentive to invest in agriculture; the resulting exodus is especially acute from rural villages.  

According to Eurostat, the number of Albanian asylum seekers is the highest in relation to population anywhere. The population fell between the beginning of this year by 14 per cent since 1990, to just under 2.8 million. Most of that fall is attributable to emigration, legal and illegal. 

Afrim Krasniqi, director of the Institute of Political Studies, observes that emigration is on two levels:

'The first and less talked about is the migration of professionals towards technologically advanced countries such as Germany. The second is related to the emigration of poorly educated (but not necessarily poor) individuals heading mostly to Britain. Numerically, the first category is significantly larger, but it does not attract the attention of the media, as it is legal migration that’s actually liked by the countries concerned.'

Although he identifies the dearth of Western investment as a problem, he too sees a bigger issue:

'The concept of the rule of law and functional democracy here is neither effective nor appealing; a large and growing part of the citizens do not believe in  change as a process they can affect. We are not dealing with political violence, but with high level corruption that significantly limits political freedoms and average living standards. It's not poverty that pushes people away, it's social insecurity and a lack of faith in change.'

Another friend, a former senior public servant, blames Rama for the collapse in standards in public life. There were reports this week, for instance, about the number of flights the PM took by private jet. This friend sent me a succession of stories on the alleged misconduct of the last election, but the most telling thing was that he didn’t want to be named; he was afraid. 

The mystery is that there’s so little critical scrutiny of the Albanian political class and government by Western embassies, including Britain’s. Some observers put this down to corruption. Krasniqi observes that 'the EU but also the UK do not have an active or effective strategy in Albania; the priority is the short-term interest in stability and control, not that of functional democracy and open societies…The model of the Albanian and regional politician that is promoted by the "West" is mainly the wrong model that the citizens here do not want, that of the strong, arrogant, corrupt and authoritarian politician.'

One response to the influx of Albanians to Britain is to send them home. Fine; fair enough. Ignore Edi Rama – whose party, it should be noted, is pretty well a successor to that of the unlamented dictator, Enver Hoxha. The harder option is to confront the problems in Albania – endemic corruption, a narco-elite and a rotten political class – through diplomacy, the intelligent deployment of international aid, and a robust approach to money laundering. You could, of course, do both.