Bulgaria - The social impact of seasonal migration

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since the late 1950s their number dramatically decreased. For 1956-65 less than 1 500
people emigrated from the country, and in 1981-8 their number was even smaller - less
than 700.
As a whole, from 1880 to 1988, around 1 283 000 people emigrated from Bulgaria, while
808 600 immigrated to the country (Kalchev 2001, 134).
1.3. Migration movements between 1989-1997
1989 was a year of dramatic transformations in both political and demographic terms.
On 10 November 1989 the Communist government fell from power. Few months before
that, there took place a large exodus of Bulgarian Turks, leaving Bulgaria for Turkey. The
majority of the political scientists in Bulgaria admit that this unprecedented outmigration
of Bulgarian Turks, then called euphemistically "the big excursion", had a
great impact upon the shattering of the Communist regime. Mass migration started in the
spring of 1989, following vigorous, and sometimes bloody, protests from Bulgarian Turks
against the renaming campaign of 1984-5, during which Bulgarian Turks were given
Bulgarian names. Termed in the Communist jargon a "revival process", this campaign,
targeting a unified and homogeneous Bulgarian nation through a forced Bulgarization of
ethnic Turks, was the push factor for their mass exit. 3 It was made possible by two
government acts, Turkey asserting its readiness to accept all immigrants from Bulgaria
and Bulgaria opening its southern border. A significant pull factor was Turkey's
willingness to receive these migrants, for whom it was given more than 250 million
dollars in grants and loans by the US government and by the Council of Europe (Bobeva
1994, 225). By the time Turkey closed the border unilaterally because of inability to cope
with the migration wave (August 1989), around 360 000 Bulgarian Turks succeeded in
leaving Bulgaria. More than 1/3 of them returned to Bulgaria when the ban on Turkish
names was revoked in December 1989. In 1990-1, an additional 150 000 Bulgarian Turks
left voluntarily for Turkey, forced by the deep economic decline which affected
especially the ethnically mixed regions in Bulgaria (ibidem, 245-6). This decline was
conditioned by the lowering of tobacco prices, the loss of Soviet block markets, the
collapse of the construction sector, and by the loss of the privileges for the border
regions, which had been a powerful economic tool for controlling emigration.
Lifting the ban on free movement after 1989 produced large migration waves from the
ethnic Bulgarian population, too. Also compelled by the declining economy, and still
experiencing travel as a form of political freedom, thousands of Bulgarians headed for
Western Europe, USA, Canada, Australia and South Africa. 4 Public opinion asserted their
number at several hundred thousands. Yet their free travel was hampered by a strict
visa regime that served as a mechanism for controlling unwanted migration. Especially
burdensome was the visa regime imposed by the EU countries given that Bulgaria
signed an association agreement with the EU in 1995 and started accession negotiations
in 2000. Put on the EU "negative" visa list in 1993, it was not until April 2001 that Bulgaria
was removed from it and its citizens permitted a visa free entry for a short-term stay in
the Schengen space. Although prior to that the majority of the applications for visas
were ultimately approved, it was the time-consuming, expensive and often demeaning
bureaucratic visa-granting procedures that effectively deterred Bulgarians from
3 For its reasons see Ilchev 2000, 242-4
4 Quoting newspaper data, Ilchev (2000, 266) writes that in the early 1990s some 300 000 ethnic Bulgarians
left the country, heading for Western Europe, North America and South Africa