Albania's Media Coverage of Foreign Workers Glosses Over Exploitation, Rights Groups Warn
TIRANA, Albania - For three decades, Albania exported its own citizens in search of better lives abroad. Now the country is receiving workers - and advocates say it is unprepared to protect them.
Nearly 22,000 foreign nationals had been issued residence permits for work reasons by the end of 2024, according to INSTAT, Albania's national statistics institute. Workers are arriving in significant numbers from Asia and Africa to fill gaps in tourism, construction, and services left by mass Albanian emigration over the past decade. But a growing body of evidence suggests the experience awaiting many of those workers is harsher than the country's public conversation acknowledges.
Mary Ward Loreto, an organisation focused on trafficking and migrant rights, has recorded hundreds of complaints from foreign workers in recent years. In 2025 alone, the organisation registered 130 complaints from workers originating from the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, and other countries. Irena Kraja, a coordinator at Mary Ward Loreto, said the most common grievance is striking in its severity.
"Ninety percent of cases reported by foreign migrant workers involve passport retention," Kraja said. "Employers generally hold onto passports as a form of leverage so workers do not leave their jobs - or leave Albania."
Under Albanian legislation, confiscating a person's passport constitutes deprivation of liberty, making the practice not merely exploitative but illegal. Despite that, Kraja's organisation says the complaints keep coming.
An analysis of online media coverage, cited in a report by journalist Viola Keta, finds that the Albanian press has largely failed to reflect this reality. Reporting on foreign workers is dominated by the narrative of labor shortages - employers unable to fill positions vacated by Albanians who have themselves emigrated. Questions of working conditions, human rights, and potential exploitation receive far less attention. The result is a media environment that frames foreign labor primarily as an economic fix rather than as a population of rights-bearing individuals.
The gap between coverage and reality carries direct consequences for governance. Albania, which spent decades as a country of emigration, has not built the institutions, legal infrastructure, or enforcement mechanisms needed to monitor foreign workers' conditions or respond to abuses at scale. INSTAT data charts the numbers; Mary Ward Loreto charts the complaints. What remains underdeveloped, according to the organisation, is the state's capacity to act meaningfully on either.
The sectors drawing the most foreign labor - tourism, construction, and services - are also sectors where informal employment is common and workers may be isolated from Albanian-speaking communities or legal support networks. For workers arriving under conditions that include passport confiscation, the barriers to reporting abuse or seeking redress are steep.
Mary Ward Loreto has documented the problem over multiple years. The complaints registered in 2025 represent a snapshot of a trend the organisation says has been building as Albania's demographic trajectory shifted from emigration to immigration. How Albania's government, labor inspectorates, and civil society respond to that shift - and how Albanian media chooses to cover it - will shape conditions for tens of thousands of people now living and working in the country.
Albania's transition from labor exporter to labor importer has happened faster than its regulatory and journalistic culture has adapted. The workers arriving to fill that gap are, in the meantime, largely on their own
