This summer, many tourists were greeted with a surprise on the Croatian coast. In several beachside restaurants, they were served by employees from… the Philippines. Brought in by planeloads for the summer season, these workers offered service in English only, as they did not have time to learn Croatian. Only the owner, behind the counter, was still a Croat.
In this Balkan country in full demographic decline, with only 3.9 million inhabitants counted in the last 2021 census, foreign workers are the only solution to meet the growing needs of the local tourism industry. According to the Croatian Ministry of the Interior, at the beginning of September, more than one hundred thousand work permits had already been granted since the start of the year to workers coming from countries outside the European Union (EU). A record figure, compared to the total number of employees in Croatia, estimated at 1.7 million people.
If half of these foreign workers still come from neighboring non-EU Balkan countries such as Bosnia or Serbia, those who come from Asia are still more numerous, with Nepalese, Indians and Filipinos in the lead, working equally well in tourism as well as in construction. “Without foreign workers, Croatia would be at a standstill”headlined the daily New listspeaking of a trend “once unimaginable” and calling on the country to “care about their integration”.
Labor requirements
We must in fact imagine the path taken by a country which had become accustomed for years to seeing its workforce emigrate massively to Western Europe to earn a better living there. But, with an unemployment rate down to 6.8%, the government, led by conservative Andrej Plenkovic, did not hesitate, in 2021, to open the doors to labor immigration wide by lifting existing quotas.
The Croatian case is not isolated in central and eastern Europe. Since the end of the Covid-19 epidemic, almost all countries in the region have started bringing in foreign workers to meet their devouring labor needs. If we add the large influx of Ukrainian refugees, these new immigrants have even enabled, in 2022, a country like Romania to return to demographic growth. After losing four million inhabitants in thirty years, the country suddenly discovered that it had gained ten thousand inhabitants in 2022, to everyone’s surprise.
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