PRISTINA -- Before clocks chimed in their new visa-free relationship with the EU on New Year's Day, an informal poll of Kosovar students in the capital produced a seemingly modest list of dream destinations.
Outside the faculty where she studies graphic design, Fatjona Hajdaraj said she'd choose Italy or Greece for the culture. Naron Bllaca, a dentistry student, said probably Austria or maybe a Scandinavian country. Enxhi Sada, a medical student, said she and a friend were eyeing a concert in France. Rilind Berisha, a pharmaceutical student, said he'd like to go to Teubingen, an idyllic German town at the foot of the Swabian Alps where about 1 in 4 people is a student at the local university.
"I want to see how they study there, what student life is like," Berisha told RFE/RL's Balkan Service.
As of January 1, holders of biometric Kosovar passports can travel visa-free for short stays to all 27 countries in the mostly borderless Schengen Area, the result of a 12-year "dialogue" with the European Commission.
Kosovar Prime Minister Albin Kurti described it on X, formerly known as Twitter, as achieving "equal standing to visit family or pursue educational, cultural & business opportunities one short flight away -- one step out of isolation, one step closer to [the European Union].
While Kosovars are keen to travel -- for all the reasons Kurti mentioned -- a sluggish economy has meant that not many of the country's 1.8 million people have the means to visit the EU. And the government, fearing a mass exodus of Kosovars seeking work abroad, is trying to persuade its citizens, especially young people, to stay at home.
Low Salaries, High Unemployment
One of the biggest obstacles facing Kosovars is economic. All of the students who spoke to RFE/RL in Pristina expressed concern about the cost of traveling. And they are probably not alone.
Incomes per capita have risen by nearly half in the past decade and the poverty rate is falling. The average salary in Kosovo, however, is still just 521 euros ($569) -- less than half that in EU laggards Bulgaria and Romania.
Even at two-decade lows, Kosovo still has some of the highest official unemployment in Europe at 12.6 percent, despite tens of thousands of its citizens emigrating each year. Official youth unemployment is even higher at 21 percent.
"Although Kosovo's growth has largely been inclusive, it has not been sufficient to provide enough formal jobs, particularly for women and youth," the World Bank concluded in its latest overview on Kosovo.
Many Kosovars have abandoned the domestic labor market. Sanije Kadriu, a university graduate in economics, stayed home to raise two children because she says wages were low in the private sector and she couldn't find a job in the public sector.
"A salary of 300 euros a month was worthless to me," she told RFE/RL's Balkan Service. "The daycare for one child alone was 100 euros, and with such a small salary, I couldn't cover my expenses."
Kadriu has been out of the labor force for more than a decade now, she said, and expects to spend her 50s unemployed, too.
In fact, more than 60 percent of working-age citizens are economically inactive, which translates into around 730,000 people between 15 and 64 who are unemployed, aren't seeking a job, or have fallen off the unemployment rolls completely. Of that total, 460,000 of them are women.
Brain-Drain Fears
The EU called visa liberalization a "significant milestone" and "a recognition of the hard work that Kosovo has done" along with Kosovars' strong support for EU integration. The bloc has also said it was a chance for the sides to get better acquainted. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008 and has since gained recognition from over 110 countries.
As momentum accrues for countries such as Moldova, Ukraine, and Bosnia-Herzegovina to join the EU, Kosovo remains just a "potential candidate" for accession. Despite some progress the country has made on reforms -- a requirement for EU membership -- Kosovo faces significant obstacles to membership, namely from enlargement skeptics within the EU and Brussels' demand for Pristina and Belgrade to resolve their many issues before either can join the bloc. To complicate matters further, five EU member states -- Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Slovakia, and Spain -- don't even recognize Kosovo as an independent state.
While Kosovo's government also recognizes visa liberalization as a milestone, as January 1 neared, political and business leaders became increasingly nervous about an unbridled rush for the exits from a country bedeviled by political instability and a runaway informal economy, as well as fallout from an ongoing battle for more widespread international recognition.
Prime Minister Kurti has urged his compatriots to "respect the conditions" and reminded them that EU visits are limited to 90 days in any 180-day period and that they are not allowed to work for the duration of their stay. Kurti's government has consistently pleaded with people not to use the trips to look for jobs in the EU.
Those government pleas might be falling on deaf ears. There have been reports suggesting that many Kosovars with jobs have been saving money and vacation days for the spring, with the hope of traveling to EU countries to land a job or paving a path to staying abroad -- even at the risk of running afoul of EU warnings against violating the rules of the new visa-free regime.
WATCH: Starting from January 1, Kosovars no longer need visas to enter the Schengen Area. Among the first who used the opportunity were 50 winners of a Vienna tour lottery organized by Kosovo's government.
Losing a sizeable chunk of its workforce would deal a blow to even the most promising sectors in Kosovo, where budding entrepreneurs have been dealing with decades of brain drain that has been sapping the workforce.
Kosovars were already a nation on the move, with remittances accounting for 17 percent of Kosovo's gross domestic product (GDP) in 2022, according to the World Bank. A widely cited survey conducted in 2020 by the Group for Legal and Political Studies showed that 48 percent of Kosovars wanted to emigrate, an accelerating trend since 2014.
Kosovo's Developing Tech Sector
Like the government, an emerging class of business owners in Kosovo is eager to stop the hemorrhaging of the workforce.
One of the most dynamic sectors is information and communications technology (ICT), where 700 new companies were launched last year to bring the total to 1,950, versus just 930 four years earlier.
Fikret Murati is the owner of Speeex, a tech-focused business service provider he launched in 2016. The company now has offices in six cities across Kosovo and employs about 2,000 people with an average age of 29 and an average monthly salary of 1,200 euros -- competitive but not unusual for the sector.
A child of ethnic Albanian emigrants who was raised in Switzerland, Murati said he thinks that reliable employers cannot only encourage young people to stay but also lure Kosovars back home.
"I think that if it offers them a secure job and opportunities for the future, opportunities for development, it isn't difficult," he told RFE/RL's Balkan Service.
The entrepreneur appears to be taking a page out of the textbooks of early U.S. tech start-ups with Speeex's new offices in Pristina offering prayer rooms and a kitchen, which Murati says is very popular among the employees.
Aldo Baxhaku, the public communications officer at local networking association STIKK, insisted that the ICT sector and its baked-in advantages make it "the only sector that has the potential to fight the emigration trend" in Kosovo.
"The [ICT] sector is growing all over the world," Baxhaku said, "but Kosovo has this advantage of young people -- 65 percent [of the population] is under 30 years old. That means you have potential."
To capitalize on that potential, Baxhaku and other high-tech entrepreneurs said that Kosovo should pick a lane in one of the fast-moving sectors -- artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, or software development -- and stick with it.
Their hope is that while Kosovars may remain frustrated with their second-tier status within the EU, the lure of visa-free travel -- and working abroad -- will be diminished as their careers take off at home.
