Romanian emigration refers to the process whereby people who were born in Romania have emigrated from their homeland to other countries. Historically Romanian emigration was a late bloomer in the mass migrations from Europe in the nineteenth century. It was not until the 1890s, for instance, that a major wave of Romanian emigres began to cross the Atlantic Ocean to various parts of the Americas. Even then the movement was substantially smaller than in other countries, with around 145,000 Romanians entering the United States during the 1890s, 1900s and 1910s, compared, for example, with over 3.5 million Italians in the same period. The advent of the communist regime in Romania following the Second World War saw impediments placed on Romanians leaving the country. With the collapse of the regime following the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Romanian emigration surged. 100,000 Romanians settled abroad in 1990 alone and the movement has continued ever since, galvanized by membership of the European Union in 2007 and the freedom of movement around Europe this has brought. Today there are very big Romanian diaspora communities in countries like Italy, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, France and Austria.[1]
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History of Romanian emigration
Romania is a country which lies almost as far away from the Atlantic Ocean and the maritime ports of Western Europe as it is possible to be. It was also one of the last parts of Europe to begin experiencing industrialization, urbanization and the population spikes that went hand in hand with the introduction of vaccines, modern medicine and improved diets in the nineteenth century. Owing to all of this, Romania did not experience a huge population boom and a concurrent wave of emigration in the nineteenth century in the manner which places like Ireland, Italy, Germany, Poland and Hungary did. Only finally in the 1890s did a notable wave of Romanian emigration begin. This saw several hundred thousand Romanians leave their country between 1890 and 1920s and resettle in places like the United States and Canada. Like the Poles and Hungarians who were arriving in large numbers to the US at the time, many of these Romanian emigres settled in large numbers in places like Cleveland, Ohio and other cities of what is now the Rust Belt but which was then the thriving heart of industrial America.[2]
A major element of Romanian emigration in the twentieth century was the departure of several hundred thousand Jewish people from the country to Israel. In the late nineteenth century Romania was home to one of the largest Jewish communities anywhere in the world. Indeed, it was in the city of Focșani in Romania in January 1882 that the first major international Zionist conference concerning the settlement of the land of Israel was held.[3] Thereafter some of the Jewish people that arrived to Israel under Ottoman and British rule between the 1880s and the mid-1940s were from Romania. The Holocaust resulted in the mass-murder of approximately half of the three-quarters of a million Jews of Romania during the Second World War. Immediately after the conflict a huge wave of emigration of Romanian Jews from Romania to Israel took place. By the time it finished the Romanian Jewish community had reduced enormously and there are less than 10,000 Jewish people in Romania today.[4]
While the second half of the 1940s and the early years of the 1950s saw the mass emigration of Romanian Jews from the country, the communist regimes across Europe clamped down on emigration in the 1950s and early 1960s. This was in order to stop the brain drain and flight of millions of young people from communist countries like East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Romania to Western Europe at the height of the Cold War. Owing to this, the level of Romanian emigration collapsed between 1950 and 1989. It only began again in earnest after the Romanian Revolution of 1989 led to the execution of the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, and the collapse of the regime. In 1990 approximately 100,000 Romanians left Romania and tens of thousands of Romanians continued to emigrate annually in the years that followed.[5]
As significant as the emigration between 1990 and 2006 was, it was eclipsed by developments from 2007 onwards. On the 1st of January that year Romania and Bulgaria became members of the European Union. This allowed Romanians to now move freely to other EU countries and to work there, although owing to mass movements which had followed the entry of countries like Poland and Hungary into the bloc in 2004, EU nations were given the option of imposing a seven-year restriction on Romanian and Bulgarian migration if they so wished. Many did not, and even those that did had to remove the embargo by 2014. Consequently, since 2007, millions of Romanians have emigrated from their home country to other European nations where standards of living and employment opportunities are significantly better than at home. Italy and Spain, two countries which like Romania have Latin-based, Romance languages as the native tongue, and which have similar climates to Romania, have been the biggest destination for Romanian emigrants, though Germany, the UK, France, Austria and Belgium also have large Romanian émigré communities exceeding 100,000 people.[6]
The Romanian diaspora
The overall size of the Romanian diaspora today can be gleaned from examining Romania’s population decline in recent decades. There were 23 million people living in Romania at the time of the Romanian Revolution in 1989. Today there are just over 19 million, a decline of around 17% in the space of three and a half decades.[7] It is also not difficult to see where these people have left for. There are over one million people of Romanian birth or of significant Romanian ancestry in Italy and the same number again in Spain, many Roma or Sinti.[8] The figure is over 800,000 for Germany and half a million for the UK. The Romanian American population is over 450,000, but only around a third of this diaspora community is the result of recent emigration, the rest being largely the descendants of the wave of Romanian migration to the US between the 1890s and 1920s.
Finally, there are significant diaspora communities all around the more developed countries of the EU, even the smaller nations. For instance, there are over 40,000 Romanians in Ireland today, accounting for slightly less than 1% of the total population, a significant enough proportion when we consider that the Romanian community barely existed on any level in Ireland a quarter of a century ago. The number increased by 50% from 28,000 to around 42,000 alone between 2016 and 2022.[9]
Explore more about Romanian emigration
- Romania, Iași, Civil Status Records records collection on MyHeritage
- Recent Trends in Emigration from Romania at OECD i-Library
- Romanian Americans at Cleveland State University
References
- ↑ https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/27927b96-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/27927b96-en
- ↑ Thedore Andrica, Romanian Americans and their communities of Cleveland (Cleveland, 2020).
- ↑ https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/focsani
- ↑ https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/romania
- ↑ https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/12/24/369593135/25-years-after-death-a-dictator-still-casts-a-shadow-in-romania
- ↑ https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/27927b96-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/27927b96-en
- ↑ https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/ROU/romania/population
- ↑ https://www.romeurope.org/IMG/pdf/Migration_fin.pdf
- ↑ https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2023/05/30/census-2022-number-of-non-irish-citizens-usually-resident-in-ireland-rises-to-12-per-cent-of-population/