Cheap Labor

In much mainstream and liberal media, anti-migration sentiment is often interpreted through a cultural lens. But to really grasp what’s going on, it’s important to understand the material conditions behind it. Indeed, immigration did not develop the same in Romania and the former Eastern Bloc as it did in Western Europe or the United States. Since the fall of Communist Party rule, Romania has been a source of large-scale emigration with millions of its citizens leaving to work abroad. Estimates put the diaspora between four and six million — around 25 percent of the country’s population. How is it that a high-income economy can still face an exodus of its own population, despite its years of growth? And at the same time, experience an explosion in immigration numbers?

The root cause can be traced back to the low-cost labor model adopted by successive governments since the early 2000s. Betting on a combination of a well-trained workforce, low salaries, and low taxes, Romania hoped to attract foreign capital in order to spur economic growth. And it did — in terms of GDP growth, the country exceeded most EU members in the last twenty-five years. Whenever businesses demanded it, taxes were lowered, labor laws were scrapped, all in order to keep them happy. But this growth was highly unequal. While most prosperity piled up in urban centers, the rural countryside and small towns were left behind.

This strategy ran out of steam in the late 2010s. High emigration meant fewer workers remained in Romania, and those that stayed were demanding higher wages. Faced with this labor shortage, the government and businesses had two choices. The first one was to change their economic model and move to a higher added-value economy with higher wages. This would have also meant to move toward a more redistributive and equitable economy, to bring back émigrés and slow down demographic decline.

The second choice was to continue with business as usual — which they did. Local capital and political elites can’t think past the low-cost labor strategy of making a profit through sheer exploitation. They remain stuck in this ideological straitjacket. But something had to change if business as usual was to continue. So they started to explore the idea of hiring migrants. If the workers don’t want to work for low wages anymore, but employers refuse to change their model, the easiest solution was a change of workers.

A New Indentured Servitude

For this to work, two obstacles had to be removed. First, local legislation required non-EU migrants to be paid no less than the national average wage, making their labor too expensive. Second, the freedom to change their employer at will meant that they could simply quit if they were unsatisfied with working conditions. Both problems were eagerly solved with the consent of all political parties: migrants could now be paid the Romanian minimum wage, around 50 percent of the national average wage they got before, and they could no longer leave their first employer for one year, without their approval.

The latter was inspired by the Kafala system in the Gulf states, a legal framework that binds workers to their employers. Moreover, while migrants are paid the minimum wage ($500 a month, after taxes), their Romanian colleagues get paid double while working the exact same job. All this, while migrants often work for up to fourteen hours per day without overtime compensation. Most migrants were brought to work in manufacturing, construction, and hospitality — the same jobs that Romanians take when emigrating abroad for work.

However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Migrant workers’ situation in Romania amounts to de facto indentured servitude. To get a job here, they end up paying around $5,000 — including legal paperwork, transport fees, and bribes to speed up the process. This money is often procured through shark loans, selling family heirlooms, or putting a mortgage on their house in their home country, hoping to pay it back with their new jobs. To lose their job before paying back those loans would mean returning home to an unpayable debt.

That is why most of them choose to endure exploitation rather than fight back. And even if they try, cases could take years in court and cost them a fortune. The game was always rigged against workers in general, but migrants don’t even stand a chance. Worker exploitation has always been a feature, not a bug.

Romania did not receive a significant influx of Ukrainian refugee workforce like Poland and Czechia did. What it did have was a wave of workers from the Republic of Moldova — a neighboring country speaking the same language. Since most of them also have Romanian passports, they were easily integrated, had the same rights, and were not registered as migrants. It was after their numbers peaked in the 2010s that Romanian employers turned their attention to non-European migrants — benefitting from their fewer work rights and lack of Romanian-language skills.

Immigration is especially entangled with the rise of the gig economy. At the start of the pandemic, all workers on food delivery apps were Romanian gig workers. Yet within two years, almost all deliverers you would see were migrants. As gig-worker fees went down, migrants became the only ones willing to accept lower pay. In Romania, gig workers are employed by a local company that acts as an intermediate between the platform and charges fees. This way, migrants become the subjects of a two-way exploitation: through the arbitrariness of gig platforms and the exploitation of Romanian companies. Though often at odds, in this case local and international capital worked hand in hand in raising profits from migrant work.

In 2023, the Economist published an article describing Romania as “changing from a country of emigrants to one of immigrants” and comparing it to Italy, which underwent the same process decades ago. In the logic of a supposed linear economic development, most countries would undergo the same phases. But what both the Economist and local pundits miss is that Romania never stopped being an emigration country, with millions abroad. Romania is in the unique situation of being at the same time a country of both emigration and immigration.

Far-Right Playbook

Romania has rarely had any notable incidents involving migrants in the past. Indeed, there were barely any migrants to begin with. However, recent months have seen an acceleration both in rhetoric and violent attacks. This is not a response to specific or real crimes committed by migrants. It is artificial rhetoric put together by the far right, trying to make it into a campaign subject for the mayoral elections in Bucharest this year and the 2028 general elections.

Most such culture-war narratives are copied from the far right in Western Europe, the United States, and the Visegrád countries of central-eastern Europe. They range from conspiracies like the “great replacement theory” to more euphemistic formulas: our incompatible values, the distinct European and Christian way of life, or other clichés in the vein of The Clash of Civilizations. Other techniques — such as fake news about rape cases that never happened and overheated words like “invasion” — have also been borrowed from far-right peers abroad. Again, it must be stressed that this was not previously present in Romania’s far-right discourse. Its introduction is a calculated change of focus in these forces’ communication.

In contrast to these cultural themes that are championed by far-right parties and conspiracy websites, there is also a narrative coming from ordinary Romanians that don’t have a political agenda. Their discontent is not focused on ethnicity but on economic hardships. Some even empathize with Asian migrants but believe that foreigners are being used to replace them as cheap labor.

Despite being a winning ticket to earn votes, until recently far-right parties have been hesitant to address the economic side of migration. This may be explained by looking at the donors and leading members of the far-right parties. Most of them are business owners, especially in construction and hospitality, sectors that rely heavily on migrant work. Those parties may have also feared that economic populism could spill over into an anti-business sentiment. While the far right often criticizes foreign corporations, they do it in the interests of Romanian businesses. After all, nationalism is for the interest of the employers, not the employees.

However, this may all change soon. Simion, the leader of Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), the biggest far-right party in Romania, has already started on the path of economic nativism and welfare chauvinism with his post against migrants in Bucharest. This echoes his past campaigns against Ukrainian refugees: the “others” are said to get all manner of handouts from the state while Romanians get nothing. It has been a successful strategy so far, since many Romanians do feel abandoned by the state and cheated by the transition to capitalism. What the far right does is find a scapegoat for all this frustration.

An especially unfortunate outcome is that many of the Romanians that preach against migration are themselves migrants. In the last quarter-century, it was Romanians who were vilified and discriminated against in the West — just recently, far-right activists in Northern Ireland set fire to the houses of Romanian immigrants. Of course, this didn’t stop Simion from participating in Tommy Robinson’s  far-right rally against migration in London on September 13.

It’s not the first time that old-time migrants turn against newcomers. Wanting to prove themselves as “assimilated,” they try in vain to become more British than the Brits, more German than the Germans, and so on. Fortunately, not all fall for this trap: 68 percent of Romanians see migrants as a boost for the economy, rather than a threat, according to a 2024 survey. Still, there’s nothing to stop the far right winning the same victories it has elsewhere in Europe.

Many in the Romanian diaspora today support far-right parties — both in Romania and in their new home countries — and adopt their narratives. Claus, for example, is a middle-aged Romanian based in Gloucestershire who regularly posts videos on TikTok about how Britain is being taken over by migrants. He only means dark-skinned, non-Europeans, of course.

The approach of the liberal establishment everywhere in Europe has proven fundamentally flawed. At best, it offers nothing more than feel-good slogans. But without addressing structural causes and capitalism, it only lays the ground for extremism to flourish. At worst, it adopts the discourse and methods of the far right, as we have seen with Keir Starmer, Olaf Scholz, and Emmanuel Macron.

What we need, in Romania and elsewhere, is a new wave of socialist movements, the only way to defeat the rise of the fascist tide. It must be one that moves away from the trap of culture wars and speaks bluntly about the class war. When looking at migrants, many Romanians see a reflection of their own condition when working abroad. “They come here for better wages the same as we did. As our relatives still do,” some of them say. This shows that there is always a form of residual class consciousness, even if it’s from instinct alone. What it needs is political representation.