Noi culturi, noi antropologii - Humanitas

10.
REFUGEE INTEGRATION IN ROMANIA
– THE FIRST AND THE SECOND WAVE
COMPARED
Astrid Hamberger
Universitatea din Bucureşti
Facultatea de Sociologie şi Asistenţă Socială
The Central and Eastern European countries have started
to receive refugees and transform themselves from refugee
producing countries to refugee destination countries once
with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the dissolution of the
Soviet Bloc in 1989. In this respect, Romania ratified the
1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of
Refugees on the 7th of August 1991 150 . Prior to 1990 the
asylum institution, based on the 1951 Convention, did not
exist in this region. Between 1991 and 2010 Romania recognized
approximately 3000 refugees under the 1951 UN
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Nowadays,
only around 1200 still live in Romania as many of them left
Romania due to the discrepancy between Romania’s economic
situation and the refugees’ individual expectations,
the lack of an integration policy and of a coherent legislation
regarding the management, rights and duties of the recognized
refugees in Romania.
My empirical research on the integration of refugees concluded
that in terms of the timing of their arrival and the
context of reception, in Romania there can be identified two
waves (or arriving decades) of recognized refugees: refugees
arrived before year 2004 (which I call the first wave),
150. Hungary recognized its first Convention refugee in 1989; Czech
Republic in 1990; Slovakia and Poland in 1992; Slovenia in 1995 and
Bulgaria in 1996 (UNHCR, 2000: p. ix)
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