Introduction to the Special Issue: Debating Immigration in a Country of Emigration

For a long time, Romania was considered a country of emigration (Ulrich et al. 2011; United Nations 2017). This status has emerged in the past twenty years due to the steady migration of Romanian citizens mainly towards Western Europe, which involved more than 3.5 million people in longer or shorter migration projects (Sandu 2010; Anghel et al. 2016; Ciobanu 2015). It generated massive loss of human resources and brain drain as well as generating population losses in many regions of the country (Vlase 2013; Ciobanu 2010; Moroşanu 2016; Anghel and Horváth 2009). With real prospects of depopulation, of economic stagnation, brain drain and with a very tangible potential of destabilizing the pension and overall social security systems, migration has started to be addressed in the past few years as a process that will generate more difficulties than opportunities even in the short and medium term (Levitz and Pop-Eleches 2010; Roman and Voicu 2010; Cosciug 2013). For the moment, the main solutions to balance and revert population losses are represented by the return of some of the migrants, and the arrival of migrants from abroad. The Romanian government was, so far, slow in enabling policies pertaining to the return of Romanian citizens’ as well as immigration of foreign citizens. However, both processes have started to be increasingly addressed in the past years by policy makers (Vlase and Croitoru 2019; Coșciug et al. 2018). Despite the fact that return migration and immigration are driven by different sets of causes, in Romania, both are