Below is an opinion piece by journalist Sonila Meço, which addresses demographic and social changes in Tirana in the context of immigration and employment. The article raises questions and concerns about how the city is evolving and what impact these developments have on daily life and urban identity.
The foreign face of a "house"
When we gathered late at home after a long day in the slums, no one had the energy or nerve for a healthy dinner.
"Pizza?" we said almost simultaneously. And less than 20 minutes passed when a shy voice on the cell phone spoke to me in broken Albanian:
"Erda, I'm at your slate"
I go out to pick up the order and see a dark-haired guy handing me the pizza and smiling with a "thank you" of jumbled consonants, the parts of which he "swallowed" by lowering his voice.
I ask him where he's from and he tells me he's from India.
Hey!!!
Third time this week. On Monday morning, at the service station as I went in to change my car tire, 5 Indian guys served me carefully, quickly and without words. Today at lunch at the shop where some good rye bread is made by an Albanian couple, an Indian served me, replacing the other Indian friend, who had left without even notifying the agency that had brought them to Tirana.
In our neighborhood, Filipino women often push strollers. In the construction site, two neighborhoods away, you'll find some Bangladeshi boys working as porters.
And only a "bye friend" from the calm, peaceful, gentle Indian brought me back to the door of the house in the city where I was born, raised, and became a mother. And for the first time, the house seemed to me like a small island in an unknown sea, where the walls speak the language of my memories, but the surrounding city speaks another language, cold, imported, that has neither roots, nor longing, nor history.
And it's not the presence of others that makes me sad, but the absence of our own.
I am not racist.
This is not xenophobia.
It is sad for Tirana that it is not growing, but Tirana that is being replaced.
The familiar voices, neighborhoods, and smiles are disappearing. All that remains is chaos and expensive rent.
When I talk to a friend who reminds me that Albanians have also been welcomed abroad, so we should welcome immigrants who come to us, I always have the conviction and courage to admit that it is a false and often hypocritical comparison.
Because Albanians, when they fled in the 1990s and with other exodus thereafter, did not go to replace local citizens, or to fill the gaps of a rotten system.
They faced walls of racism, hard labor, years of undocumented living, and slowly adapted to functioning societies. They integrated through law, school, language, and personal sacrifice. They were not embraced as a solution to the emptying of the countries they migrated to, but were tolerated as a challenge.
Whereas Albania is not treating immigrants today as a challenge to be managed with dignity, but as a low-cost replacement for a generation that has left. It is not building a system of coexistence, but an (anti)model where the Albanian leaves for a decent salary, while the foreigner is given a minimum wage so as not to speak out, not to protest and not to ask for more.
Therefore, it is not the same thing. Albania today is not helping others, but is replacing itself. And this is dramatic.
When an acquaintance, comfortable with state work, tells me that this is development, I ask him to look his children in the eye and affirm it in front of them. “They are not here,” he says. “They are not educated here.” And again, without insulting him for hypocrisy, I remind him that development is when the people who built this city live better. This is ours is an emptiness. It is a silent population shift. And that his children were not driven away by boredom, but by a lack of hope. And the Indians, Bangladeshis, Africans who come to Albania do not find the European dream here, but another form of survival.
Real development occurs when a country raises wages, attracts talent, dignifies the profession, and creates a productive middle class. Albania is doing none of these. Albania is exporting its youth and importing foreign poverty. In countries where Albanians emigrate, foreign workers fill the gaps in value-added sectors, in technology, construction, healthcare. In Albania, they replace workers who have been forced to flee for survival, for wages that do not provide a living. And not in productive sectors.
"It's modern to have foreign workers in every corner of the city," writes an acquaintance comfortable with civil society projects. But she remains silent after I tell her that there is nothing modern about the fact that a poor country, with a thin layer of oligarchs, is replacing its own people, not for development, but because there is no one to serve them. Albanian youth are not leaving because there is no work. They are leaving because it no longer makes sense. Because work here gives you neither dignity, nor security, nor a future. Meanwhile, Albania replaces young people with cheaper labor forces, who do not complain, do not vote, do not protest.
“This is cosmopolitan Tirana, Mom,” my teenage daughter tells me, laughing at my bewilderment. But I tell her that she is the one who is confused. Calling Tirana “cosmopolitan” today because there are more Indians, Filipinos, and Bangladeshis in the drudgery is a profound misunderstanding. Because a city becomes cosmopolitan when it absorbs cultures, ideas, knowledge, investments, and builds coexistence on mutual respect and high living standards, not when it fills the void of its own immigration.
Being cosmopolitan does not mean sending your children away and filling the squares with people who do not know what this country is, but when you preserve your identity and open the door to the world equally. In the "cosmopolitan" Tirana of our days, the Albanian is no longer represented, but replaced. And this is not globalization, but organized emptying.
Moreover, cosmopolitanism requires a system, an institutional culture, and social standards. Tirana does not have these. It only has construction, unfinished concrete, and poorly paid jobs.
And how can you build a state, my dear friend, on the import of poverty, while exporting the intelligence, strength, and hope of your country every day?!
When I returned to the pizza after the flood of 1001 thoughts, it had cooled. It had become stale. A sour taste invaded my larynx and surprisingly I didn't bother to boil an egg and salt a tomato for dinner. Perhaps from a subconscious inhibition as a form of protection against another Indian delivery man, who with broken Albanian and minimum wage would wish me good night at the door of the house in the city where I was born, raised and where I became a mother.
And Tirana has not changed because the world has come to us. It has changed because we have fled from it. Foreigners are not a problem, but the emptiness that awaits them is. Because the city does not become better when it is filled with strangers, but when those who built it still feel part of it. And this feeling is fading, quietly, without resistance every day.
A city doesn't find its soul in those who temporarily fill it, but in those who remember it as home even when they are far away. And choose one day to return to love it again.
