Bulgaria - The social impact of seasonal migration

7. Conclusions and Recommendations
I. Current migration trends differ significantly from the pre-1989 tendencies. As a
whole, from 1880 to 1988, around 1 283 000 people emigrated from Bulgaria, while 808
600 immigrated to the country. In that period, in-migration included mainly ethnic
Bulgarians living on the territories of neighbouring countries, while the main waves of
out-migration were comprised mostly of ethnic minorities living in Bulgaria,
predominantly ethnic Turks. The main reasons for both out- and in- migration were
political. In-migration flows now include more refugees and foreign immigrants, while
out-migration has no such clearly expressed ethnic profile – it is characteristic for all the
ethnic groups inhabiting Bulgaria nowadays. The main reasons for emigration now are
economic.
The historical heritage has the following consequences for the current migration
patterns:
The Bulgarian community abroad is quite diversified, including different social groups,
with different ethnic origin and different motives for emigration. The notion of different
groups of Bulgarians living abroad has been embedded in the new law on Bulgarians
living outside of Bulgaria (of 11 April 2000), which introduces the concept of "Bulgarian
community abroad". The political use of the term “Bulgarian community abroad” is
helpful, but for analytical purposes and in the process of elaborating concrete policies,
it has to be differentiated in order to explain the specific characteristics of the different
groups which ought to be treated in a different political manner. A special emphasis
deserves to be put on new emigrants, whose motives for emigration are quite different
from those of the old diaspora.
Besides, there is still ethnically specific out-migration, as the already existing large
ethnic Turkish diaspora helps a lot the seasonal migration of ethnic Turks currently
living in Bulgaria.
In addition, the in-migration of foreign citizens is a relatively new phenomenon and
needs to be investigated and treated with special attention.
II. One of the most important conclusions of the study is that there is no precise
unified methodology for observing emigration trends. There is an urgent need of
elaborating such a methodology and establishing of a stable, publicly accepted
information database on the processes of emigration that would be able to take account
of the period of staying abroad. There are no data about seasonal migration, let alone
the irregular one. Keeping track of the number of irregular emigrants is a very difficult
task that requires more efforts and coordination among different institutions, both
Bulgarian and foreign ones. A possible partial solution might be the regular gathering of
information from the Bulgarian municipalities about the size and destination of seasonal
migration.
Data from the national censuses conducted in 1992 and 2001 showed that between these
two censuses approximately 196 000 people emigrated from Bulgaria, while the number
of persons who have returned or settled to Bulgaria was a total of 19 000. Net migration
from Bulgaria is negative, amounting to roughly 177 000 people who had left the country
in 1992-2001, or an average of 22 000 people leaving Bulgaria yearly. Other data – of state
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