Thursday, February 28, 2008

Θελουμε την Αλβανια στην ΕΕ ?

In what has to do with my personal experience, I strongly support entrance of Albania in EU.
I happen to have friendly relations with an albanian and a bulgarian family that are immigrants in Greece. With both of them we discussed all the problems they had with the greek state burocracy concerning their residence, green cards, insurance, border problems when they were visiting their countries during vacation.
You can imagine that, while recognising that Greece offered them a certain standard of living and the possibility of prosperity they did not have in their countries, all these problems created a "bitter" feeling consitering the greek state and the quality of its organisation.
But you cannot imagine the change of attitude of my bulgarian friends after Bulgaria joined EU, when they started to feel totally safe with their bulgarian passport, they started to accept friends and relatives who just desided to visit them and see Athens without the need of making long-queues out of a greek-consulat expecting for visas, when they went to Bulgaria for vacation without a 5-hour delay for customs control, and especially when they entered Greece again after the vacation with their bulgarian-plated car with none stopping them and asking why they were coming.
Now they feel just like me (I'm also an economic immigrant (more than half of greeks are), since I came to Athens looking for a better job, and my hometown where my parents live is 800 km away), even their trip to Sofia is 100 km less than my vacation trip to hometown.
Now they also critisize and discuss about their two countries (home and host) in an almost neutral way, finding the pros and contras of each one, without the falsifing lence of the immigrant who is facing personal discrimination problems from the mechanism of the state he is living in.
I strongly believe that the entrance of Albania in EU will have the same effect to my Albanian friends, and to the rest of their compatriots living and working in Greece, which will smoothen reasons of tension, and the feelings these people transfer to their friends and relatives when they visit Albania on vacation.

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