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Bogdan Voicu, sociologist at ICCV: "Migration is for us a kind of natural experiment!"
Alexandra Mănăilă- Reporter
27 March 2015
Bogdan Voicu is a sociologist and he performs his activity at the Research Institute for the Quality of Life within the Romanian Academy, being also concerned with immigration. At the second international Conference of CDCDI, ,,Challenges Ahead: Integration of Migrants on the European Labour Market”, held in Bucharest between 12 – 13 March 2015, Bogdan Voicu had the role of moderator within the workshop "Impact of migration in the countries of origin and of destination"; this is a vast subject but at the same time familiar for the Romanian researcher, both professionally and personally, considering that he lived in Germany for about 4 years and now has returned to Romania.
Reporter (Rep.): You have been working at the Research Institute for the Quality of Life (ICCV) since 1996. Have you discovered how we can measure the quality of life of an immigrant?
Bogdan Voicu (B.V.): The quality of life is very interesting because it depends on the standard adopted by the community to which the person belongs and on his/her personal pursuits and the group to which that person relates. Immigrants may live better or worse, depending on where they are. There may be immigrants living together in a community at the outskirts of a city in tents and feeling happy to be with their families and to earn something, while there may also be immigrants who live in a mansion or a big flat in a central area and who live well apparently, but who are deeply deprived. When I was in Germany I met a man in a tramway in Köln, he was quite clean but poorly dressed. He was Romanian, from Vaslui, he lived in a park and was sleeping in the open air. I asked how he felt, considering that we were towards the end of the winter and he said: "Look, the summer is coming and it will be fine. I was not getting any income at home, I have been here for 6 months and I earn a few hundred euros per month and I also send money home, I eat, I have work and I also drink a beer from time to time". He was happy, satisfied, the quality of his life was excellent from his point of view, although based on our standard it was not so: he had no roof above his head, he had no medical insurance. So, it is measured depending on where the person lives and what they expect from life.
Rep.: Which country provides the best conditions for immigrants?
B.V.: I don't know, if we look at income, Switzerland and Luxembourg in Europe; if we look at social benefits - Sweden, Norway. There are however happy people in the UK, in Germany or in Portugal, a country in crisis, or even in Romania. Everything is relative. Those who leave are normally those who are not accomplished here financially or personally. Some return, others go further to other places, re-migration is an important phenomenon in contemporary society.
Rep.: In the workshop you moderated participants discussed about the immigrants in Germany, an example of successful integration...
B.V.: I would not hurry to say they are very successful. Immigrants in Germany are very present, many of them have higher education, which makes the difference between migration to Germany and migration to the South. Germany has that model of society where a family normally has one salary, and if a migrant family manages to have one salary, or even two, as we are used to, they get very high in the social ranking, and this is a proof of integration and high prestige. But I also met Romanians begging on the street.
Rep.: Turks and Italians are already at the second generation in Germany. What about Romanians?
B.V.: Migration started after 1990, there are a few older generations with German origins who left in the 1980s and are now at the second generation, but we have no well developed diaspora. Romanian migration is young. There are not many people at the retirement age, but I'm afraid that soon, in about 10 years, we'll start to have Romanians at the retirement age, who worked almost exclusively on the black market or only for a short while with work contracts and have difficulties because they want to come back.
It is cheaper to live in Romania and there will be a big issue with requesting social rights, because when they reach the retirement age they will not have a sufficient cumulated duration of contributions, or they will not have enough knowledge to manage the steps for transferring the contribution from one country to another. The Romanian state will be facing such return migrants and may have a problem finding simple ways to unthread the issue; and if it comes to people who worked only without a contract, they will become a burden for the social aid system.
Rep.: How does a Romanian migrant integrate in Germany?
B.V.: I have never felt any discrimination, but I am in a rather special niche in the academic environment, and in Germany it is very easy if you are in this environment, because everything is so well ranked... It is difficult to make a comparison based on my case, but otherwise I believe it is easier to integrate in Italy or Spain, on the one hand the language is easier to learn and on the other hand the type of society. Looking at the population structure with respect to education, Romania is a poorly educated country, comparable with Spain, Italy and Portugal in Western Europe; it is therefore easy to get there because you are similar to them. This is not the case however in Sweden, Finland or Norway, where it is very difficult to integrate even as a university graduate, because the level in the higher education is different. As regards the academic environment, it's not easy to get to Germany either, but after you found the position it becomes easy. Once you have entered the academic system, what matters is the recommendation. This is also the case in Luxembourg where I worked as Visiting professor - CEPS/INSTEAD Luxembourg (Centre d'Etudes de Populations, de Pauvreté et de Politiques Socio-Economiques/International Networks for Studies in Technology, Environment, Alternatives, Development). The recommendation is essential; if it comes from a professor in Bulgaria or Romania of whom nobody has heard, it is very difficult to enter, but if it comes from a known or even a local professor, it is different.
Rep.: What are your ongoing projects regarding migration?
B.V.: I have a project for which the Romanian government persists in underfinancing and in failing to comply with contracts, although we exceeded by several times the performance indicators undertaken. We look at how migrants change when they move from from one place to another. Migration is for us rather a natural experiment, this is how a Danish called it, and we look at how migrants change their values, ways of thinking. The project progressed quite well, luckily. I've noticed that trust in people tends to be influenced by the trusting culture in the destination country, but it's also influenced by the culture in the home country. The immigrant combines the two types of influence - of the host society and the origin society. We compared migrants from different countries, we worked with quantitative data, but we have not focused at all on Romania so far. We look at Romanians who come back, and it appears that they return with a cultural luggage from their destination country. It can be good, it can be bad, it depends from where you look at it. People who returned from Arabia with a totalitarian culture have other expectations from the state, while people who return from America have different expectations, are more participative, they wish for a very strong government but less democratic, in the European sense of the word. Society is changing now, migration makes us change a lot. In Romania 10% of the population has a migration experience, have stayed for at least a few months for studies or work or for family care abroad. We have to look at the figures again, but there are countries with a much higher percentage of immigrants. Luxembourg is a typical country with many immigrants, half of the population is not born in Luxembourg, and of those born there, 20% are Portuguese, they already have an important share, being at the third generation there.
Rep.: How do immigrants change their values?
B.V.: The theory of assimilation said that immigrants become just like the natives after a period of staying in the destination country. Things are not really like that, people maintain contact very easily now with their countries of origin. There are whole neighbourhoods of Turks in Germany where women who do not work have their first contact with the German society when they take their child to school, they do not speak German because they stay at home and watch Turkish TV channels, they speak with their fellow women in Turkish as well, they buy things from the Turkish shop; when the child gets to school, they have to interact with teachers and it's a big shock. The Turkish community in Germany reaches 2-3 million, the German society also changes implicitly by exposure to their way of life.
Rep.: We, Romanians, have registered an increase in the level of tolerance over the last years. Does it also apply to immigrants?
B.V.: We are surprisingly open - but we still suspect a kind of conformism when answering the question, considering that people have few experiences with immigrants as such, they have more experiences with emigrants, half of the population have relatives or friends abroad, and if Romanians are tolerant towards emigrants, they also tend to be so towards immigrants. If however we have a strong economic growth and thus a need for workforce, as we do not have a policy for attracting immigrants, we might have surprises related to a reduced tolerance towards Sudanese, Uzbek people etc. It happened everywhere in the world. It is easy to blame the latecomers, particularly if they are foreign.
Rep.: What should we do in this line?
B.V.: We should have an immigration policy, to see whom we attract and why. Germany announces on an annual basis the number of immigrants with higher education who are expected that year, we have no such estimations, nor a budget for that. However in the medical field we know what the demand is, but are we prepared to bring here Chinese, Mongol, Sudanese, Uzbek doctors, to teach them the language and to work? Will the local community accept them? Similalry in the educational system we need teachers, professors, why not...
Rep.: Coming back to the panel you moderated at the International Conference of CDCDI, it comes out from the presentations that Australia and the New Zealand have interesting migration policies...
B.V.: New Zealand and particularly Australia have a strong policy for attracting immigrants. Canada is at the saturation level, but it can any time change the policy, considering that it is poorly populated. The first two have a momentary increase, they started to like attracting immigrants. They are selective and they consider a lot Vietnamese and Indonesian people because they already have a local population, but they need for instance medical doctors to speak those languages, so they recruit based on very clear policies. The presentation on Eurasia indicated that it has no policy at all, they do not think what to do with migrants. Romania would have a lot to learn from Australia, considering that we have no migration policies at all: neither for emigration, nor for immigration.
Reporter (Rep.): You have been working at the Research Institute for the Quality of Life (ICCV) since 1996. Have you discovered how we can measure the quality of life of an immigrant?
Bogdan Voicu (B.V.): The quality of life is very interesting because it depends on the standard adopted by the community to which the person belongs and on his/her personal pursuits and the group to which that person relates. Immigrants may live better or worse, depending on where they are. There may be immigrants living together in a community at the outskirts of a city in tents and feeling happy to be with their families and to earn something, while there may also be immigrants who live in a mansion or a big flat in a central area and who live well apparently, but who are deeply deprived. When I was in Germany I met a man in a tramway in Köln, he was quite clean but poorly dressed. He was Romanian, from Vaslui, he lived in a park and was sleeping in the open air. I asked how he felt, considering that we were towards the end of the winter and he said: "Look, the summer is coming and it will be fine. I was not getting any income at home, I have been here for 6 months and I earn a few hundred euros per month and I also send money home, I eat, I have work and I also drink a beer from time to time". He was happy, satisfied, the quality of his life was excellent from his point of view, although based on our standard it was not so: he had no roof above his head, he had no medical insurance. So, it is measured depending on where the person lives and what they expect from life.
Rep.: Which country provides the best conditions for immigrants?
B.V.: I don't know, if we look at income, Switzerland and Luxembourg in Europe; if we look at social benefits - Sweden, Norway. There are however happy people in the UK, in Germany or in Portugal, a country in crisis, or even in Romania. Everything is relative. Those who leave are normally those who are not accomplished here financially or personally. Some return, others go further to other places, re-migration is an important phenomenon in contemporary society.
Rep.: In the workshop you moderated participants discussed about the immigrants in Germany, an example of successful integration...
B.V.: I would not hurry to say they are very successful. Immigrants in Germany are very present, many of them have higher education, which makes the difference between migration to Germany and migration to the South. Germany has that model of society where a family normally has one salary, and if a migrant family manages to have one salary, or even two, as we are used to, they get very high in the social ranking, and this is a proof of integration and high prestige. But I also met Romanians begging on the street.
Rep.: Turks and Italians are already at the second generation in Germany. What about Romanians?
B.V.: Migration started after 1990, there are a few older generations with German origins who left in the 1980s and are now at the second generation, but we have no well developed diaspora. Romanian migration is young. There are not many people at the retirement age, but I'm afraid that soon, in about 10 years, we'll start to have Romanians at the retirement age, who worked almost exclusively on the black market or only for a short while with work contracts and have difficulties because they want to come back.
It is cheaper to live in Romania and there will be a big issue with requesting social rights, because when they reach the retirement age they will not have a sufficient cumulated duration of contributions, or they will not have enough knowledge to manage the steps for transferring the contribution from one country to another. The Romanian state will be facing such return migrants and may have a problem finding simple ways to unthread the issue; and if it comes to people who worked only without a contract, they will become a burden for the social aid system.
Rep.: How does a Romanian migrant integrate in Germany?
B.V.: I have never felt any discrimination, but I am in a rather special niche in the academic environment, and in Germany it is very easy if you are in this environment, because everything is so well ranked... It is difficult to make a comparison based on my case, but otherwise I believe it is easier to integrate in Italy or Spain, on the one hand the language is easier to learn and on the other hand the type of society. Looking at the population structure with respect to education, Romania is a poorly educated country, comparable with Spain, Italy and Portugal in Western Europe; it is therefore easy to get there because you are similar to them. This is not the case however in Sweden, Finland or Norway, where it is very difficult to integrate even as a university graduate, because the level in the higher education is different. As regards the academic environment, it's not easy to get to Germany either, but after you found the position it becomes easy. Once you have entered the academic system, what matters is the recommendation. This is also the case in Luxembourg where I worked as Visiting professor - CEPS/INSTEAD Luxembourg (Centre d'Etudes de Populations, de Pauvreté et de Politiques Socio-Economiques/International Networks for Studies in Technology, Environment, Alternatives, Development). The recommendation is essential; if it comes from a professor in Bulgaria or Romania of whom nobody has heard, it is very difficult to enter, but if it comes from a known or even a local professor, it is different.
Rep.: What are your ongoing projects regarding migration?
B.V.: I have a project for which the Romanian government persists in underfinancing and in failing to comply with contracts, although we exceeded by several times the performance indicators undertaken. We look at how migrants change when they move from from one place to another. Migration is for us rather a natural experiment, this is how a Danish called it, and we look at how migrants change their values, ways of thinking. The project progressed quite well, luckily. I've noticed that trust in people tends to be influenced by the trusting culture in the destination country, but it's also influenced by the culture in the home country. The immigrant combines the two types of influence - of the host society and the origin society. We compared migrants from different countries, we worked with quantitative data, but we have not focused at all on Romania so far. We look at Romanians who come back, and it appears that they return with a cultural luggage from their destination country. It can be good, it can be bad, it depends from where you look at it. People who returned from Arabia with a totalitarian culture have other expectations from the state, while people who return from America have different expectations, are more participative, they wish for a very strong government but less democratic, in the European sense of the word. Society is changing now, migration makes us change a lot. In Romania 10% of the population has a migration experience, have stayed for at least a few months for studies or work or for family care abroad. We have to look at the figures again, but there are countries with a much higher percentage of immigrants. Luxembourg is a typical country with many immigrants, half of the population is not born in Luxembourg, and of those born there, 20% are Portuguese, they already have an important share, being at the third generation there.
Rep.: How do immigrants change their values?
B.V.: The theory of assimilation said that immigrants become just like the natives after a period of staying in the destination country. Things are not really like that, people maintain contact very easily now with their countries of origin. There are whole neighbourhoods of Turks in Germany where women who do not work have their first contact with the German society when they take their child to school, they do not speak German because they stay at home and watch Turkish TV channels, they speak with their fellow women in Turkish as well, they buy things from the Turkish shop; when the child gets to school, they have to interact with teachers and it's a big shock. The Turkish community in Germany reaches 2-3 million, the German society also changes implicitly by exposure to their way of life.
Rep.: We, Romanians, have registered an increase in the level of tolerance over the last years. Does it also apply to immigrants?
B.V.: We are surprisingly open - but we still suspect a kind of conformism when answering the question, considering that people have few experiences with immigrants as such, they have more experiences with emigrants, half of the population have relatives or friends abroad, and if Romanians are tolerant towards emigrants, they also tend to be so towards immigrants. If however we have a strong economic growth and thus a need for workforce, as we do not have a policy for attracting immigrants, we might have surprises related to a reduced tolerance towards Sudanese, Uzbek people etc. It happened everywhere in the world. It is easy to blame the latecomers, particularly if they are foreign.
Rep.: What should we do in this line?
B.V.: We should have an immigration policy, to see whom we attract and why. Germany announces on an annual basis the number of immigrants with higher education who are expected that year, we have no such estimations, nor a budget for that. However in the medical field we know what the demand is, but are we prepared to bring here Chinese, Mongol, Sudanese, Uzbek doctors, to teach them the language and to work? Will the local community accept them? Similalry in the educational system we need teachers, professors, why not...
Rep.: Coming back to the panel you moderated at the International Conference of CDCDI, it comes out from the presentations that Australia and the New Zealand have interesting migration policies...
B.V.: New Zealand and particularly Australia have a strong policy for attracting immigrants. Canada is at the saturation level, but it can any time change the policy, considering that it is poorly populated. The first two have a momentary increase, they started to like attracting immigrants. They are selective and they consider a lot Vietnamese and Indonesian people because they already have a local population, but they need for instance medical doctors to speak those languages, so they recruit based on very clear policies. The presentation on Eurasia indicated that it has no policy at all, they do not think what to do with migrants. Romania would have a lot to learn from Australia, considering that we have no migration policies at all: neither for emigration, nor for immigration.
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