FLASH
Shkruar nga Thoma Gëllçi
The Trump administration today does not see the Albanian citizen as an individual, but as part of a mass that seeks asylum, that knocks on welfare doors, and that appears in hazy statistics...
The US State Department's decision to suspend immigrant visa processing for 75 countries, including Albania, was accompanied by a dubious-sounding justification: immigrants from these countries "receive welfare benefits at levels unacceptable to the American people." Such a sentence, served without any explanatory note, without any source, and without any clear statistical breakdown, is propaganda.
On January 4 of this year, President Trump published on Truth Social a list of nations that, according to him, “live on welfare.” Albania was there with the mysterious figure of 41.3 percent. No one yet knows what this figure represents: newly arrived immigrants or American citizens of Albanian origin? Legal benefits or criminal abuses? Temporary emergency assistance or full social schemes? From which database was this data taken? Which federal agency reported it? Absolute silence. In the United States, there are institutions that produce detailed statistics: the Census Bureau, the Department of Homeland Security, USCIS, HHS, the Social Security Administration. None of them publish reports that divide social benefits by nationality of immigrants in this political and stigmatizing way. As far as I have asked, no American federal agency has reported any such data.
The list of 75 countries has one thing in common: most are countries that Trump has previously labeled as “shithole countries.” Somalia, Haiti, Eritrea, Iran, etc., countries that for years have been seen by Trump administrations as a geopolitical, cultural or electoral problem. Here we are dealing with a selective political logic, where if you come from a poor or institutionally fragile country, you are considered a potential burden. Welfare thus becomes a moral alibi for a decision that is essentially political, electoral and symbolic: telling the electorate that you are “protecting American wealth” by closing the doors to those who are plundering it.
But Albania is not on this list by chance. Today, we are the country with the highest number of asylum seekers in Europe in relation to the population. A country without war, without massive natural disasters, without a classic totalitarian regime, but with a massive exodus. This reality speaks more about the failure of our domestic policies than about any American prejudice. When citizens flee in biblical numbers from a country that on paper is called a “democracy in transition”, the problem is not America, but Tirana.
The Trump administration today does not see the Albanian citizen as an individual, but as part of a mass that seeks asylum, that knocks on the doors of welfare and that appears in blurry statistics. This is injustice, but also a direct consequence of policies that have produced despair, poverty and lack of perspective in Albania. The suspension of immigrant visas does not punish abusers, they are already within the system, but families awaiting family reunification, professionals who have followed every legal rule and people who have never requested social assistance. In the name of a number without a source, the doors are closed to thousands of individual stories.
Social assistance is not the cause. In Tirana, we must ask ourselves what we are doing so that Albania no longer appears on these shame lists. Hope in Albania is not fading by chance, but is being drowned out every day by a system that has been recycling the same political caste, the same faces and the same mechanisms of power for 35 years. Real democracy has remained a slogan, not a civic experience. Political rotation has become almost impossible, elections are regularly contested and not recognized by the parties, while international reports speak every year of the same wounds: weak institutions, state capture, systemic corruption and selective justice. In this environment, the citizen no longer sees change as a result of voting, but only as a result of emigration.
And how can young people not flee, when they live in a country that drowns every time it rains, where agriculture and livestock have become statistical decor while markets are filled with imported products, where local production is dying and hope is being exported along with the youth? This is not simply an economic failure, but a moral and political failure. It is this internal reality, not American welfare, that is pushing Albania towards the lists of shame and its citizens towards the closed doors of the world.
Lini një Përgjigje