More than 6000 people have been granted Bulgarian citizenship since the beginning of the year – a number much higher than in the past years. Bulgarian Vice President Angel Marin told national commercial television channel bTV on November 12 that the number of applications for Bulgarian citizenship in recent years had gone up dramatically. Marin has the final say on the granting of Bulgarian citizenship. He said that the growth in applications, and corresponding rejections, had risen. Marin said that 929 applications were rejected because they were submitted by people with a criminal history. Known drug traffickers figured among the applicants, with some being under investigation or wanted by Interpol, Marin said. They were denied citizenship because they were considered a threat to national security, he said. Much speculation has been floating around regarding the drastic interest by Macedonians citizens to receive Bulgarian passports. Numbers vary from 10 000 to 20 000 for Macedonians who have received their Bulgarian ID cards over the past five years.
In July 2006, German newspaper Die Welt reported that about 20 000 Macedonians already had obtained Bulgarian citizenship, and 20 000 more have applied for it. For many of those already holding Bulgarian passports, the procedure has been facilitated, as they are of Bulgarian descent. Still, some critics say, granting of citizenship is not really monitored and one may be given citizenship even without having solid proof of Bulgarian origins.
Marin also recalled that in 1990, Bulgarian citizenship requests added up to 1039, with the number in 2001 reaching 5495. As reported by Bulgarian-language news agency Focus, 5656 people received Bulgarian citizenship from the beginning of 2006. Most requests came from Macedonians and such hopefuls are likely to increase even more from January 1 2007.
As The Sofia Echo reported on November 10, from the day Bulgaria joins the European Union, Macedonians will be able to apply for free-of-charge Bulgarian visas. Among others interested in receiving Bulgarian citizenship are Serbians, Montenegrins, Moldavians and Russians.
The enthusiasm of Eastern European pretendants for Bulgarian citizenship is related, by critics, to Bulgaria’s forthcoming EU membership. However, Marin did not agree with this view, saying that the motivation behind the citizenship requests was not related to EU entry or the benefits for Bulgarian citizens related to it.
But it is not just Eastern Europeans interested in Bulgaria. Each year the number of Westerners keen on receiving at least Bulgarian residency is increasing, with British citizens being the most prolific. An article in The Guardian on September 2 reported that the number of British living in Bulgaria had doubled in the past year.
More than 1150 were given residency in 2005 alone. Another article, on October 16, suggested that roughly 3000 British have come to live in Bulgaria.
Recently the Institute of Sociology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences together with London’s Westminster University completed the first research on the subject of British people in Bulgaria. It shows that while the majority of British live close to the seaside, there are settlers spread all across the country. The study says that there are villages in Bulgaria where between 50 to 80 per cent of the houses belong to British people.
Meanwhile, on November 15, Bulgaria in EU Press Centre broke a news story of an undercover investigation by two journalists from the Bulgarian daily 24 Chassa, which exposed some flaws in the UK labour market. Milen Petrov, a reporter, and Pierre Petrov, a photographer, published on November 13 an investigative report describing how the two of them entered the UK with illegal documents, and found work within a day on the black labour market.
The men went to an illegal labour market in north London to which Albanians, Romanians and Bulgarians without work permits go every morning from as early as 1am until 8am to get picked up by employers looking for manual workers, the British Daily Express reported on November 14. Despite supposed regular check-ups by authorities, Pier Petrov and Milen Petrov landed jobs on a building site near Aldgate Tube station.
In a letter published on November 15 in 24 Chassa, Milen Petrov explained that “the Bulgarian one-month wage that you can earn for a single day in Great Britain sentences the workmen to a miserable subsistence”, as quoted by Bulgaria in EU Press Centre. Thus, he claims, the assertion that Bulgarians will get rich is ridiculous. The limited access to the British labour market will not resolve any of the problems on which the decision to impose job restrictions for Bulgarian and Romanian workers was grounded, said Petrov. “The few thousand Bulgarians that will eventually go to Britain after January 1 are not at the heart of the British immigration worries. The main immigration pressure comes from outside Europe,” Petrov said.
