Albanian emigration refers to the historic process whereby people have left Albania over the last several centuries and created an Albanian diaspora abroad. The Albanian diaspora is comparatively small by comparison with most other European states. There are numerous reasons for this. Albania’s position in the Mediterranean mitigated against trans-Atlantic emigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when tens of millions of Europeans from other countries left the Old World and headed to the Americas. In the second half of the twentieth century the long dictatorship of Enver Hoxha between 1944 and 1985 led to strict prohibitions on emigration, while Albania’s failure to acquire membership of the European Union in the early twenty-first century has prevented Albanians from seeking economic opportunities around Europe. Nevertheless, some considerable Albanian emigration has occurred, with migrant communities arising in countries like Turkey, Germany, the United States and Italy.[1]
Research your ancestors on MyHeritage
History of Albanian emigration

As with any part of the world, people who were born in the region where the country of Albania lies today have been migrating to other places for thousands of years. In ancient times, for instance, the southern parts of Albania were considered part of the Greek world and so there was traffic between here and other places of Greek settlement like Magna Graecia, ‘Great Greece’, in Sicily and southern Italy across the Straits of Otranto from Albania.[2] This interchange continued for centuries to come and resulted, for instance, in the Kingdom of Albania being ruled by the French royal House of Capet between 1272 and 1383, after they acquired control over much of Sicily and southern Italy.[3] Italy remains one of the core lands of the Albanian diaspora to this day and the people here of Albanian descent are known as the Arbëreshë, an ethno-linguistic Albanian-Italian group. Their roots go back to the period of Capetian ruler in Albania in the fourteenth century and the centuries thereafter as Ottoman rule was established in Albania.[4]
In early modern times Albania was conquered and ruled by the Ottoman Empire. This transformed Albanian society, as conversion to Islam was more pronounced here than in most other parts of the Balkans. Turkish control over the mountainous country was maintained longer than most other parts of the Balkans. When Albania finally acquired its independence in 1912, large scale population transfers between the Ottoman Empire and some of the other Balkan states like Greece and Romania had already been underway for decades. These were much more muted in Albania, owing to the country’s status as a Muslim majority country. Still, the legacy of Ottoman rule was that hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians had migrated eastwards to Istanbul and other regions and Turkey today is the largest arena of the Albanian diaspora.[5]

Towards the end of the Second World War a communist regime was established in Albania, headed by Enver Hoxha. He would rule as dictator of the country for four decades down to his death in 1985. In the chaos which prevailed across Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war, many Albanians emigrated away from what historically has been one of the very poorest countries in Europe. In order to prevent extensive depopulation, Hoxha’s regime eventually implemented border controls and bans on emigration which were amongst the strictest in the Cold War world. Efforts to leave Albania could result in being imprisoned for years or even shot by border police. Consequently, Albanian emigration dried up in the 1950s and remained low for decades thereafter.[6]
In more recent times, since the death of Hoxha and the collapse of communism in the country, Albanians have begun to emigrate from their homeland again. Some 300,000 Albanians emigrated in the course of the late 1980s and early 1990s and that process has continued since, with the country’s population falling from around 3.3 million at the end of the 1990s to less than 2.8 million today, a decline of around 15%. Some have headed for the United States, some for Italy, some for the United Kingdom and some for countries like Germany, Switzerland or Australia. The numbers have always remained relatively modest. This is largely owing to visa and work restrictions. Despite applying for membership of the European Union as early as 2009, accession talks have been slow and so Albanians do not have the same freedom of movement around Europe that a great many other groups who have emigrated from their respective countries in large numbers since 2004, like the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians, have had as a result of EU membership. Hence, Albanian emigration, while significant, has been more limited than most other European countries over the centuries.[7]
The Albanian diaspora
There are two elements to the Albanian diaspora today. By far the larger element is the presence of large Albanian communities in neighboring countries within the Balkans, specifically Kosovo, North Macedonia, Greece and Montenegro. Kosovo is a country which historically came into being since the 1990s as a result of the majority of the population being ethnic Albanians who wanted to break away from minority Serb/Yugoslav rule. Hence about 90% of the 1.9 million people in Kosovo are technically part of the Albanian diaspora.[8]
Similarly, though not on quite the same scale, the borders between Albania and Greece and North Macedonia have always been malleable and large Albanian minorities have ended up inside the borders of these two neighboring states in modern times. This has led to some geopolitical concerns in recent decades about the drive towards creating a Greater Albania through unification of Albania and Kosovo amongst other measures.[9]
The Albanian diaspora further afield is much smaller. There are five countries that stand out. Depending on the criteria applied, anywhere up to three million people in Turkey today have Albanian ancestry, the result of population transfers and migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the Ottoman Empire slowly fell apart. The next major arena of the Albanian diaspora is Italy, the product of the region’s geographical proximity to south-eastern Italy. There are as many as 400,000 ethnic Albanians in southern Italy today. 300,000 people in Germany are part of the Albanian diaspora, 170,000 in the United States and 190,000 in Switzerland, though these figures are often conflated with ethnically Albanian Kosovars who fled from Kosovo during the war there in 1998 and 1999. Beyond this there are smatterings of Albanian emigres and descendants thereof in countries like Canada, the United Kingdom, Austria, France and Australia, but overall the Albanian diaspora is one of the smaller national diasporas of any European country.[10]
See also
Explore more about Albanian emigration
- Migration and Albania at UN Migration
- Albanian asylum seekers in the UK and EU: a look at recent data at The Migration Observatory
- Albanian Migrants at the BBC
- Enver Hoxha: the lunatic who took over the asylum at Open Democracy
References
- ↑ Joniada Barjaba, ‘Albanian Diaspora across the World’, in Athens Journal of Mediterranean Studies, Vol. 5, No.3 (July, 2019), pp. 173–184.
- ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1522/illyria---exploring-ancient-albania/
- ↑ Etleva Lala, ‘Regnum Albaniae, the Papal Curia, and the Western Visions of a Borderline Nobility’ (PhD dissertation, Central European University, 2008).
- ↑ https://www.thecambridgelanguagecollective.com/europe/the-arbereshe-italys-albanian-diaspora
- ↑ https://www.rferl.org/a/albania-independence-celebration/24783576.html
- ↑ Çlirim Duro and Flavia Kolleshi, ‘Albanian migration during the period of communism, based on economic and political factors’, in International Journal of Economics, Commerce and Management, Vol. 11, No. 9 (September, 2023), pp. 215–226.
- ↑ Agata Domachowska, Albanian Migration as a Post-Totalitarian Legacy’, in Migration Studies, No. 2 (2019), pp. 87–100.
- ↑ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/62382069
- ↑ https://www.economist.com/europe/2007/01/18/what-happened-to-greater-albania
- ↑ https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-and-emigrant-populations-country-origin-and-destination