Romania does not fear criticism from the EU for "importing" Moldovan immigrants through the EU's back door as the Western press has reported, Basescu said in an interview, which he gave jointly with his Moldovan counterpart Mihai Ghimpu.
''I have nothing to fear. Romania abides by the 1997 Council of Europe convention on granting citizenship,'' said Basescu, adding that the requests were examined case-by-case and nobody was forced to take Romanian citizenship. As a matter of fact, Moldovans have been granted a right of which they were deprived by the then Soviet Union.
''It is not citizen Dumitrescu from [the Moldovan city of] Cahul who has decided to lose his [Romanian] nationality, it's Stalin who has decided for him,'' Basescu affirmed.
Ghimpu said that indeed there were many more Moldovans in the EU without Romanian nationality. He mentioned 25,000 Moldovans in Portugal and 180,000 in Italy.
''The problem is not the Romanian citizenship, the problem is the poverty in Moldova,'' Ghimpu said. He added that the same phenomenon had occurred in the past - with citizens of Spain and Portugal seeking work in richer countries - and for this reason he saw ''nothing wrong'' with the development.
Wrong visa policy?
Problems surrounding the wave of Moldovan immigration appear to be related more to visa issuing policy than the granting of nationality.
There are roughly 600,000 Moldovans working in the EU, Basescu stated, adding that most of these people were being exploited on the black labour market. Moldova has a population of four million.
Asked by the press whether Romania was not partly responsible for this large number, as visas were also issued to Moldovans by the Romanian embassy, Basescu replied: ''They have come with a visa to Romania. They have gone with a visa to Spain and Italy, and then have settled there. You don't imagine 600,000 Moldovans going without visas to those countries.''
