Romania has more time to integrate Ukrainian refugees. Time alone will not close the gap

Leaving emergency support does not mean becoming independent

The problem Alexia heard most often from Ukrainian refugees was housing.

Emergency accommodation can help when someone first arrives. It cannot become a permanent solution. The difficulty starts when people have to move from that first layer of protection to rented housing and a life increasingly financed on their own.

Romania's current accommodation rules illustrate how short that transition can be. New arrivals under temporary protection can receive a monthly lump sum for up to three months from the date of entry. UNHCR also notes that payments may sometimes be delayed because of processing times or limited funds.

For someone with savings, documents and a stable income, finding housing can already take time. For a person who left Ukraine suddenly, it can happen while they are also trying to find work, solve administrative issues and understand institutions they have never dealt with before.

Alexia says she encountered situations in which refugees left accommodation centres without a clear alternative waiting for them. State support could help with the transition, but delays or difficult procedures sometimes created a gap just when emergency accommodation ended.

Her point is not that emergency assistance should continue indefinitely. It is that independence cannot simply be scheduled.

A person does not become ready to support themselves because a temporary form of assistance has reached its end.

“The problem is no longer only whether support exists, but whether people can reach independence before emergency support runs out.”

The extension to March 2028 removes some uncertainty over legal status. It does not make housing cheaper, shorten every procedure or guarantee that employment and stable accommodation will arrive at the same moment.

A right on paper can still be difficult to use

Housing is only one part of the problem.

Temporary protection gives beneficiaries access to residence, housing, the labour market, medical assistance, social welfare and education for children.

Alexia sees a gap between those rights and the ability to use them.

Bureaucracy often sits in the middle.

Someone who left home quickly may not have every document needed for work or education. Replacing a missing document creates another procedure. Applying for assistance creates another. Each step may be manageable on its own, but refugees can be dealing with several at the same time.

That changes what bureaucracy means in practice.

A procedure designed for an ordinary administrative situation can become a serious barrier when the person using it is also looking for housing, work and stability in a country whose language and institutions may still be unfamiliar.

Alexia does not describe the main problem as a complete absence of assistance. In many cases, the assistance exists. The harder question is how it was designed and how easily people can reach it.

This is where NGOs become crucial.

Alexia points to organisations such as JRS Romania as intermediaries that help refugees understand the system, identify their rights and navigate the steps required to access support. But she also sees the need for so much mediation as a weakness in itself. Without these intermediaries, she argues, integration could become substantially more difficult.

Recent research gathered by the European Commission points in the same direction. Studies on integration in Romania identify complex procedures, language barriers, problems with continuity of services and access to healthcare among continuing difficulties. The same overview notes that a 2026 JRS Romania survey found that many beneficiaries of temporary protection had limited access to clear information about their future legal options, with uncertainty affecting housing, employment, education and healthcare.

NGOs can bridge those gaps. They cannot be the answer to every administrative weakness.

A useful measure of an integration system is therefore not only how many rights it provides. It is also how easily someone unfamiliar with that system can actually use them.

Romania also has to integrate the newcomers

The third problem is less administrative.

A refugee may have a home, a job and legal status and still feel like a stranger.

Alexia believes this part of integration receives too little attention. She connects some of the resistance towards Ukrainians with older attitudes towards people seen as outsiders. These attitudes did not begin with the war in Ukraine.

She recalls growing up around comments about ethnic Hungarians who supposedly did not belong "in our country", or warnings against playing with Roma children. Such remarks may seem small when they are heard in childhood. But they can teach people very early where they believe the boundary between "us" and "them" lies.

Ukrainians arrived in a society that already had some of those boundaries.

Economic frustration can make them sharper. Alexia recalls reactions in which assistance to refugees was viewed less through the reasons Ukrainians had fled and more through scarcity: Romania already has little, so why should part of that little go to newcomers?

For her, this is not only a question of education. It also reflects the frustrations of a society dealing with its own economic and social problems.

That does not mean every concern about refugee support is hostility towards Ukrainians. It does show why integration cannot be separated from conditions inside the host society.

If people already feel insecure about their own living standards, newcomers can more easily be seen as competitors for limited resources.

Alexia sees a very different dynamic among younger children.

When she spoke with children who had entered Romanian schools, they talked enthusiastically about their new friends and the Romanian words they had learned. The contact was ordinary. They went to school together, learned together and formed relationships before nationality had the same weight it often carries in adult debates.

This gives the integration question a different direction.

Romania has spent several years asking how Ukrainians can adapt to Romanian society. The next stage also requires asking how Romanian society adapts to their presence.

Schools can create this kind of contact naturally for children. It is harder to reproduce among adults, where workplaces, neighbourhoods and local communities matter more.

The EU has also begun preparing for the eventual transition beyond temporary protection. Its framework envisages a gradual move to other residence statuses for eligible people, including on employment, education or family grounds.

For Romania, that makes the next two years more than an extension of the emergency.

They are time to make procedures easier to use, reduce dependence on intermediaries and help more people move from temporary arrangements to stable ones.

But another year of legal protection will not create belonging on its own.

The first response to displacement was about providing safety. The next one is about making an ordinary life possible: stable housing, access to work, institutions that people can navigate and communities in which Ukrainians are no longer treated permanently as people who have just arrived.

Temporary protection answers the question of whether someone can stay. Integration begins when staying no longer feels temporary.

Expert contribution

This analysis draws on a written exchange with Alexia Stancu, an International Relations and European Studies student at SNSPA and a volunteer with JRS Romania. Her observations on housing, access to support and community integration are attributed throughout the article.