The participants from Bulgaria part of project ”Entrepreneurship 4 Integration” wrote an article about the sitation of refugees in their countries. Enjoy reading!
Bulgaria, as a country situated in the Balkans in a key location where East meets West, doesn’t get directly and strongly affected by the refugee movements, as their focus moves to the countries in and around Western Europe. However, the country still has many challenges to face in this regard. Though we are inviting and welcoming, we face many difficulties on the way – conservatism, narrow-minded elderly and often low performance of our government in terms of providing support for the migrants and the refugees. There are social centers, local volunteers, charity campaigns, donations and various organizations working and supporting the migrants, but usually there is no visibility and transperency of what these authorities aim to achieve. People with recognized refugee status have the rights of Bulgarian citizens except the right to vote. However, they are significantly more vulnerable due to a number of reasons and factors hindering their access to the labor market and their inclusion in society:
– not knowing the Bulgarian language
– lower education
– difficulty in proving the education and qualifications of the highly qualified
– less developed social support networks and more difficult orientation in the new environment
Sadly Bulgarians are winning the championship as the most intolerant in the European Union. On average, for the European Union, 57% are friendly towards and don’t mind knowing and working with migrants, in Bulgaria only 15% would accept a migrant to be their colleague, doctor, neighbor, or to become part of the family.