Trafficking in Reverse

The stickiest part about starting a blog (right after finding out that one's carefully thought-out username is already taken, of course) turns out to be picking what on earth the first post should be about from among the countless vague ideas habitually haunting one's brain.

So as not to start out with a bigger mess than is inevitable, here's something small and of little importance to most people in the world, but like every such thing, tying in nicely with the rest of the madness. (And perhaps a bit Vonnegutian too in its futility.)

As we well know, all around the world people are trying to move from poorer countries to richer ones to find a better life, or at least to make some money to take back home and maybe start a little business with. The "First World", naturally, in the primary target of this migration, but there's an intricate hierarchy of countries out there: South Africa worries about Botswanan immigrants, while Botswana wants to keep out Zimbabweans. Jamaica deports Haitians, the Bahamas deports Jamaicans, and the US deports everybody.

There is nothing new about this migration, of course; people have been moving around from the beginnings of human history, and often a lot less peacefully than today's migrants are doing. This natural process has become a lot more difficult though since nation-states were set up, and passports, visas and work permits introduced. The poorest of the people are the least likely to secure those goodies, so on all susceptible borders there's a steady flow of humans being trafficked from south to north, from east to west, from poorer to richer.

If we are to believe the rumors though, for probably the first time in history a government has managed to reverse that direction, and it has to do with passports too. On the border where people are normally smuggled from Romania to Hungary (with a view to continue on further west, in most cases) Romanians are now paying the coyotes to get them back into Romania without being greeted by their own friendly Romanian immigration officer. According to a new regulation, any Romanian citizen who spends more than three months out of a six-month period in the European Union without additional permits will be stripped of his passport upon re-entering his own country. By his own coutry's authorities.

The three-months limit, of course, is EU regulation for tourist stays, and the Romanian government says they're doing this on Brussel's request. But that is a hard one to swallow, as the EU usually expects accesion candidates (Romania is slated to join in 2007) to adhere to basic human rights legislation, and interfering with citizens wishing to leave their country is not acceptable under such. Romanian border guards have also been checking if Romanians traveling to the EU have sufficient funds for their stay, another unusual situation: after all, its the target country's authorities that typically make such inquiries, not one's home country.

Here's a Romanian civic organization's take on the situation (scroll down to "Circulation Rights")


And here's the Romanian government's website explaining their case. (It might be more convincing in Romanian, I don't speak the language. The English version is seriously mangled, evidence that the translation business is not exactly a meritocracy in Romania...)


The irony, of course, is that such interference with emigration was/is common practice in dictatorial regimes, and thus figures greatly in the region's past. But while in other "post-communist" countries it was properly discarded after the democratic transition, in Romania the idea that the state can tell citizens whether they can travel to a foreign country and for how long seems to linger on. Only this time it's not intended to keep everybody in at all costs, but to prevent embarassment to the country's image by its less fortunate citizens. The law of course does not discriminate, but border guards do: everybody in Romania knows what visible ethnic minority should preferrably not cross the border lest they give trouble and make things bad for all Romanians. To many, it even seemed like a legitimate objective, trying to prevent the (unlikely) re-introduction of visa requirements or a delay in the country's EU accession. Now, when passports are being taken away, people are finally seeing this for what it is: a state seriously overstepping its boundaries and violating its citizens basic rights - and all in the name of European integration.