In our public discourse, our project texts, documents and online pages, we use the term "migrant" instead of immigrant - the Romanian term for people of other origins arriving in our country. Migrant is the term used at international level (UN and EU), by those who talk about migration/migrants rights (not immigrants rights), and we take as a reference the international public policy documents to which we tend to align ourselves.
But we need to explain the context:
- Some of the Romanian institutions have the word "immigrant" in their name (Inspectorate General for Immigration, for example).
- Some Romanian strategies on the subject are in conjunction with "immigration" (National Strategy on Immigration)
- Others have moved on to migration and asylum (Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
- At the National Institute of Statistics, when they talk about international migration, there is information about Romanians leaving...
- There is a Coalition for the Rights of Migrants and Refugees
In the Spelling, Orthographic and Morphological Dictionary of the Romanian Language, the linguistic reference in terms of norm in Romania, doesn't include the term migrant, but those of immigrant and emigrant (with the respective differences in meaning*), but we, as a children's rights protection organisation, will refer to what we want, waiting for the terms to be changed, as the national legislation on this issue was drafted before the EU accession and therefore has not been updated with the current public discourse.
According to the Explanatory Dictionary:
To emigrate =To leave the homeland in order to settle (permanently or temporarily) in another country; to expatriate.
To immigrate = To come to a foreign country in order to settle there.
Text developed with the support of Sinzianei Dobre, Consultant Advocacy, and Corina Popa, Ethics and Compliance Manager Terre des hommes Romania
