Legal work and migration Everything you need to know about working legally in EU

In the period January- April 2011 the European Union project „Strengthening Moldova’s capacity to manage labour and return migration” in collaboration with the National Bureau of Statistics carried out a survey on the topic „Living and working legally in the European Union”.

The goal of the survey was to measure the level of knowledge and use of legal channels to migrate to one of the European Union’s country of Moldovan citizens who have the goal of living and working in EU and what are the conditions of staying/working in EU countries.

In December 2010, EU-funded project has launched a massive campaign on informing and raising the awareness of Moldovans who plan to migrate to the European Union regarding legal working and living in EU. What we aimed for was to encourage Moldovans to make use of legal channels when migrating.

The survey was done on a pattern of 1600 persons, with the age between 15 and 55 years old who come from rural and urban regions of the country. The main conditions of the survey was to have respondents who have never had a migration experience or in the last 10 years hadn’t migrated to EU to receive results as closer to the reality as possible. The error margin in such a survey is 2%.

According to the survey 42,8% of Moldovans (who stated their willingness to migrate to EU) would still prefer Italy, France and Portugal as main EU destination countries followed by Spain and Germany.

Table 1. EU top receiving countries for Moldovans planning to migrate to EU

Although two thirds of the respondents showed a high level of knowledge regarding the legal ways of migration and legal conditions of living and working in the receiving country, relatives and friends still represent the main source of information for them. The second source is internet followed by persons/companies that offer assistance when going abroad.

Table 2. Sources of information for Moldovans in terms of living and working legally in EU

The survey underlined the fact that Moldovans need more information on where to find (sources) information about vacancies and employers from EU countries, as well as what is the procedure of applying for the job.

The confidence in diplomatic missions of Moldova in EU countries has grown considerably in the last period. About 70% of the respondents stated that they would have addressed to the diplomatic missions of Moldova in case of finding difficulties regarding their staying/working in the destination country. At the same time it was observed a low confidence in Moldovan Diaspora organizations. Probably this is due to the fact that in top receiving EU countries Diaspora is not very well organized while in some countries Moldovan Diaspora organizations don’t even exists. In this respect, the EU project has an activity directed to strengthen the links between Diaspora organizations of Moldovans abroad (EU) and home country by improving the capacities of Diaspora organizations in different domains. This will help them to provide Moldovans with updated information and support them when arriving in the destination country.

This survey helped to better understand migration tendencies of Moldovans in terms of country preferences and what would be the level of knowledge or lack of it regarding legal procedures and channels of migration.