On November 26, 2018, the conference “Integration of Migrants and Refugees in Romania: Current Progress and Problems” organized by the Center for Public Innovation and its partners from the Coalition for Migrants and Refugees Rights (CDMiR)On this occasion, the conclusions of the first evaluation report on integration policies carried out within the transnational NIEM project – National Integration Assessment Mechanism funded by the Fund for Migration, Asylum and Integration in the framework of a consortium of 17 non-governmental organizations and universities from 15 EU Member States. The data gathered through various research methods, namely legislation analysis, document analysis, secondary data analysis and on-line questionnaires and interviews, revealed the following results for Romania:
• one of the shortest asylum procedures (2016): the average settlement time – 30 days;
• family reunification procedure (2016);
• poor teaching infrastructure of Romanian language courses;
• fragmented integration practices (education, employment);
• favorable legal framework – NIEM 62/100 score;
• integration practices are deficient – NIEM 35/100 score;
• inter-institutional cooperation for integration – NIEM 27/100 score;
• the lack of data prevents the integration, especially in the field of education, of vocational training and access to the labor market.
At the same time, the representatives of the population regarding the migrants were presented, while the reserved attitudes regarding the existence of the immigrants in the Romanian society were preserved. Following the analysis presented, a negative attitude has also emerged, including the emigration of Romanian citizens abroad.Discussions continued with debates on foreigners’ access to the labor market. Within this section, LMA Romania had a presentation on the issue of posted workers, containing issues of interest regarding the Law number 247 for the modification and completion of some normative acts on the aliens regime in Romania, published in the Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 941 of November 7, 2018, which began to produce legal effects starting on November 9, 2018.
At the same time, the latest statistics provided by the General Inspectorate for Immigration, according to which there are 8.214 third-country aliens with valid right of residence in the territory Romania for employment purposes and 1.233 foreigners with valid right of residence for secondment.
The second part of the day was dedicated to the annual meeting of the Coalition for Migrant and Refugee Rights, in which APML RO presented its activities in 2018, actively participating in setting priorities for 2019.
We congratulate the Civic Innovation Center for the perfect organization of the event and wish them success in the activities of all Coalition partners.
