When Malbor Duka was in primary school 10 years ago, he decided he would not build his life in Albania.

Now 26, Duka moved from Burrel in the north to Tirana to continue his secondary education at a private college.

He chose to study at a college where teaching was conducted in English because this would help him leave Albania and find a job abroad. Later, he also learned German, in order to keep open the possibility of working in Germany.

His goal was clear from the beginning. He wanted to become a doctor, but not in Albania.

After an attempt at studying abroad, which failed due to problems with documents, he continued his studies at the University of General Medicine in Tirana.

In 2016, when he was in secondary school, he had a group of 16 friends. Today 13 of them no longer live in Albania. They have now built their lives abroad, mainly in the U.K.

“I rarely go to my hometown, as I have no one to meet there, my friends have all left, there were 16 of us, today there are only three of us in Albania; my parents usually come to Tirana on the weekends, and I no longer have a reason to go there,” said Duka, who despite wanting to leave Albania, continues to live and work in his country.

Malbor Duka, 26 years old, wanted to become a doctor, but not in Albania. Photo: Isa Myzyraj.

Burrel, like many areas of northern Albania, is a region that young people are abandoning.

There are no exact numbers for people who leave, region by region because Albania has not conducted a census since 2011, and the census planned for 2021 failed. Taking the enrollment of children in schools and births in hospitals as a basis, the north is one of the areas with the sharpest decline in population.

In recent years, those in the municipalities surrounding Dibra and Kukës, where Burrel is located, have not seen any development projects to improve the socio-economic life of the area. Local politicians accuse the government led by the Socialist Party of discriminating against the north in this regard.

During the months of June, July and August 2022, thousands of Albanians from these northern areas took the dangerous route, crossing the English Channel that connects France and the U.K. — in search of the “English dream.”

These trips are arranged with traffickers who help people cross the channel into the U.K.

According to the U.K. media, more than 12,000 Albanians arrived last summer by raft. According to a report published in 2021 by the Institute for International Economic Studies in Vienna, Austria, 500,000 people fled Albania between 2010 and 2019.

Little London

About 180 kilometers north of Tirana, the region of Has, on the border with Kosovo, has a longstanding relationship with the U.K. The U.K. media has referred to this region as “Little London.” According to locals, most families in Has live on remittances from abroad, particularly from the U.K., and the area is seeing an investment boom from migrant money.

In the small town of Kruma, you can spot yellow U.K. license plates, English-style cafes and several blocks of recently built luxury villas, which are either empty or inhabited by elderly couples.

The young people there are influenced by this panorama.

“Of course, when expensive cars came to Has and new houses were being built monthly, I thought that in the U.K. money can be made quickly. I didn’t know how it was made, but I thought that there you could create a big income and buy cars and build houses,” said Brilant, a 16-year-old from the Has village of Zrahisht who migrated last year. Brilant is a pseudonym that he chose to identify himself with.”

On the morning of August 7, 2022, he left his home to go to Tirana, where he and his father boarded a plane to France. His father returned alone two days later. Brilant, together with another group from Has, met with traffickers in the French city of Calais and got ready to leave by raft.

Brilant, who had left school and didn’t think twice about leaving. He borrowed 5,000 euros from a relative and headed for the U.K.

“I had never left Albania. It was the first time I had taken a plane,” he said. “We stayed in France for 12 days. We stayed on a mountain, near the sea, we were 36 people in the group and I think 20 of us were from Albania. We were waiting for the right time for us to cross the sea, but almost every night there were either police patrolling, or there were too many waves, so we couldn’t leave.” 

The evening of August 19, 2022 seemed to be the right time for him and his group to embark on the perilous journey.

“That day, around 5:00 p.m. we readied the raft and boarded it. It was steered by a 17-year-old boy, during almost the entire trip, few people spoke, it was eerily quiet,” said Brilant. The trip took about eight hours.

Now the 16-year-old is an undocumented migrant in the U.K. and despite being a minor, he works in a car wash belonging to a relative in London.

“I work about 10 hours a day, it’s difficult of course, but I have to work a lot because I have to pay back around 5,000 euros in debt, in my country, and at the same time I have to help my family,” said Brilant. Until August last year he had only seen the good side of the U.K., on social media, where people look happy and rich.

A teacher in Has explains how the population of this area sees young people like Brilant as “saviors” who are rescuing their families from extreme poverty.

“No one here considers that their children are being trafficked by unknown people. They simply hand their children over for a journey whose destination may never be reached,” said the teacher, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“Apparently someone wants to keep the number of students who drop out of school a secret. I have about 14 students who left for a few months during the summer, they just didn’t show up in class, their parents don’t officially declare that they have migrated, but being a small area, we quickly find out that they have ended up in the U.K.,” he said.

In the dormitory of Skënderbeu High School in the town of Kruma in Has, in 2012 there were 150 students who came from the surrounding region. This year there are only 50 students.

This reflects broader decreases in school enrollment across the country. According to data from the Institute of Statistics in Albania, in the school year 1994-1995 in Albania, about 77,000 students were enrolled in the first grade, while in the year 2022-2023 there were only about 29,000.

The biggest decline reflected by migration is in the 10th grade, where about 28,000 students were enrolled this year as opposed to 31,000 a year before.

Running away and not just for the money

After the 1990s, when Albania emerged from the communist regime that had isolated the population for more than four decades, the country experienced several waves of migration. Initially, Albanians migrated mainly to neighboring Greece and Italy and the migrants were from the south and central region of the country, including coastal cities.

Migration to the U.K. increased after 1999 when Italy and Greece tightened migration measures by introducing strict controls of their coastline and land. In conditions where it was almost impossible to enter neighboring countries, local traffickers found other countries to take Albanians to.

Migration to the U.K. was facilitated by the connections migrants made with each other. Many from the north had already chosen the U.K. as their destination and persuaded their relatives to follow the same path.

Due to the war in neighboring Kosovo, many Albanians took advantage of the situation and fled to the U.K., presenting themselves as Kosovar refugees. In the 2000s many fled the country by boat from the coastal cities of Vlora and Durrës. 

After 2013, Albanian migrants turned to the U.K. again. Traffickers discovered new lines and new vehicles, where migrants were forced into cargo trucks and forced to pay up to 25,000 euros per person to secure a place.

Since the numbers became unaffordable, in the summer of 2022 the traffickers again returned to the old method with rafts. The amount required to secure a place on the raft, according to the interviewees, now ranges from 3,500 to 4,500 euros. 

The main reason for fleeing the country is the economic situation, but not the only one. 

“The reasons for young people leaving are complex, it is no longer only purely economic, but the economic reason is the main one,” said Duka. “Quality of life is also a reason.”

According to him, in Albania there are no possibilities for professional development, which is necessary in his profession. Duka has completed six years of studies in general medicine and is waiting to specialize, which requires developing expertise in modern medicine. Duka added that due to the failing of the educational and scientific system in Albania, specialization is not possible.

This is because Albanian universities are consistently ranked among the weakest not only in Europe but in the Western Balkans.

In February 2023 the Spanish group Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain, prepared a worldwide ranking of universities. In the list, the University of Tirana was ranked 3,975th in the world. Fourteen universities from Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina were ranked higher. 

Migen Qiraxhi, an expert on education and youth issues who works for Civic Attitude, a local organization in Tirana, said, “The main thing is unemployment, or low wages in cases of employment, which make it difficult to afford living, making it impossible to even own an apartment.” He noted that the lack of sports centers, youth centers, theaters, museums, botanical or zoological gardens, contribute to this decision.

Qiraxhi added that the country has major problems with corruption and that the state has proven incapable of managing essential services such as education, health and public safety.

Unwanted migrants in the U.K.

In June, July and August, the British press repeatedly wrote about Albanians arriving in the U.K. by boat. 

Facing a new increase in migration, in July 2022 Albania and the U.K. signed a memorandum of cooperation where they pledged to increase joint work to prevent Albanians crossing into the U.K. through the English Channel.” The U.K would return undocumented Albanian immigrants from the port of Dover.

But the Albanians “were lucky.”

At the end of September, the U.K. government’s office for Immigration, Security and Law declared invalid the agreement that then Secretary of State Priti Patel signed with her Albanian counterpart Bledar Çuçi. 

According to the decision, any migrant who entered the U.K. illegally, including Albanians, should be dealt with using standard procedures and not on the basis of their nationality. The U.K. government confirmed that it has no right to accelerate the deportation of Albanian asylum seekers after their arrival. This decision came after refugee charity Care4Calais challenged the policy in court. 

The decisions made by the U.K. government were accused of being against human rights. At the climax of this debate, the Albanian government was involved in an exchange of harsh accusations with the U.K. government, as Suella Braverman, the current Secretary of State, labeled Albanians as “criminals.”

Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama condemned the use of his country’s citizens as “scapegoats” for the failed migration policies of the U.K., saying that the government must fight organized crime of all nationalities.

Local experts say that the Albanian government is not doing enough to stop the emigration of citizens.

“Not only are they not doing enough, but in the public discourse of the government, it is rejected that this reality is a crisis and the prime minister and ministers declare that this is natural,” said Migen Qiraxhi.

As clashes between Albanian and British politicians continued, in mid-January 2023, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Albania, in an unprecedented announcement, said that it had summoned the U.K. ambassador to give him a diplomatic note. This was a result of the language that the U.K. Minister of State for Immigration, Robert Jenrick, used in a video published on Twitter.  

In that video, Jenrick is seen visiting a migrant removal center, where he declares “I met the fantastic staff who are working around the clock to find the Albanians, to stop them, put them in carts, and take them to the airport and to return them to Tirana.”

This was the first time that a foreign ambassador has received a diplomatic note from the Albanian government for “hate speech.”

On January 12, 2023, the U.K. deported 43 people to Albania. In order to curb undocumented migration and to create new opportunities in Albania, the U.K. government, through the embassy in Tirana, has offered about 8 million pounds (9.2 million euros) for projects for the municipalities of Kukës, Has and Tropoja, regions where out migration is higher. The projects are mainly aimed to create job opportunities for young people.

Despite this, the U.K. continues to deport dozens of illegal migrants to Albania, while the number of Albanians choosing to go to the U.K. in small boats has decreased during the winter months, mainly due to weather conditions, as the boats cannot sail on the open sea in bad weather.

As young people from Albania continue to be tempted by the opportunity to secure better economic conditions by migrating to the U.K, their expectations may collide with a different reality there.

“To be honest, the situation here is 100% different, you have to work hard, you don’t have time for anything else,” said Brilant.

Feature Image: Isa Myzyraj.

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