With the increasing number of foreign workers who have the opportunity to work in our country, problems have started to appear. For months now, many foreign recruitment agencies have been complaining about the faulty way in which visas are issued, but now things have reached a whole new level and the lives of innocent people thousands of kilometers away from their homes are being completely shattered by the Romanian authorities' inability to cope with the requests for processing documents.
This is also the case of workers deported due to loopholes in the justice system, such as Alma Caballero, a nanny from the Philippines who found herself with a deportation notice and taken into custody directly from her employer's home.
"My employee came to the country through Work from Asia, and I took her over from another employer in April last year. As Her residence permit expired on August 3, 2021 and expires on August 3, 2022, the papers for renewal of the document were submitted on July 19, 2022. The IGI (General Inspectorate for Immigration) came to my house, asked to see it and picked her up on the grounds of illegal employment, as she has a permit valid until August 3, 2022 and an extension of stay pending. We were waiting for our license renewal appointment and I understand that the IGI's are very busy, but there was no way we were anticipating such a deployment of forces. Alma Caballero is first and foremost an extraordinary person, a member of our family. All her money goes home to her parents to take care of her two children. After spending almost 7 hours in the custody of the authorities, Alma found the strength to come home with a smile on her face to take care of her children", said Mrs. Alexandra Craina, Alma Caballero's employee.
About the disarming situation she is going through these days, Alma Caballero said, "I am grateful to the family where I work, because they are good people, who have shown me how much they care about me by not abandoning me to the Immigration. I love them, I thank them and I am very grateful that they are there for me".
From foreign recruitment agencies, to dozens of employers and even workers from abroad, they are all advertising the unworkable bureaucracy applied by the Romanian authorities to bring Asian labor to the country. As the quota of foreign workers with the right to work in Romania rose to 100,000, it soon became clear that the authorities were unable to back up this promise with action.
Desperation is the watchword for Romania's job placement and recruitment agencies, which are losing clients and helplessly stand by as people who came legally to work in Romania are deported.
"The IGI issued a fine and an order to leave the country to a foreign worker in a completely shocking manner. When the procedure dictated by the authorities was followed to the letter, the result defies legality. What is more, they issued an order requiring the employee to leave the country within 15 days, and the employer was fined 10,000 lei. All this while Ms. Caballero has a registered employment contract, but due to the lack of resources faced by the authorities, they invoked the reason that the employee would be working illegally in Romania. Completely false and outrageous. The justification received from the authorities has no legal basis whatsoever to support the reasons given", said Yosef Gavriel Peisakh, General Manager of Wor from Asia, about one of the most controversial cases he has faced in his more than 12 years of experience in the field of foreign recruitment in Romania.
