Where Do Romanians Immigrate(d)? // Unde imigrează sau au imigrat românii?

Data postării: Nov 05, 2013 10:2:5 AM

The 2012 Romanian version of the World Values Survey includes a question about the countries in which the respondents have family members, relatives or friends. Each respondent could indicate a maximum of nine countries. We have clearly distinguished between Romanian friends and foreign ones, but it resulted that extremely rarely there is a respondent to mention a country where he has non-Romanian friends or relatives but only foreign contacts.

The bellow table gives an image of where incipient Romanian diaspora may form. For simplicity, I included only the most frequent destinations*. When reading the table, one should keep in mind that there are 1503 respondents, and each could mention a country only once (even if, for instance, there were three relatives living in Canada, Canada was counted in the table only once or the corresponding respondent). They also were allowed to mention several countries up to a maximum of nine. (for instance one could say that has friends and relatives in Canada, family members in Togo, non-Romanian friends in Italy, while other relatives are in Hungary).

It turns out that about one of three respondents in our sample** has at least a connection in Italy.

*respondents also mentioned other countries where their friends, relatives or family members live: Luxembourg, Russia, New Zealand, Egypt, Lebanon, Moldova, Poland, Cyprus (T), Morocco, Kuwait, Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia, Iceland, Malta, Andorra, Singapore, Costa Rica, Guinea-Bissau, Peru, Finland, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Slovakia, Mexico, Montenegro, North Ireland, Japan, Syria, Togo, Libya, Azerbaijan, Albania.

Among Romanians, a fifth has relatives in Italy, and many others have contacts in Spain, Germany, the UK, France or the US. Overall, almost half of the sample has at least a relative abroad. 930 respondents (62%) indicated at least a contact in a foreign country. The frequency of discussing with the ones living abroad is higher than once a month for 394 of our respondents (this is more than a quarter of the sample!).

** the sample is representative at national level, with a maximum sampling error of 2.53% guaranteed with 95% probability.