Today foreign media is available to almost anyone, anywhere – especially if they have an internet connection. Watching content from overseas can help people learn new languages, shaping future migration choices. In this column, we describe the historical case of Italian television in Albania. Accidental access to TV shows from Italy led many Albanians to improve their Italian language skills and made those with university degrees more likely to move to Italy after the fall of the communist regime in 1990.
After WWII, the Communist Party took power in Albania and established a totalitarian regime, marked by extreme isolationism. Borders were sealed, and all emigration and immigration were strictly prohibited. Foreign cultural influences, especially from the Western world, were banned.
But this complete isolation had a small crack in its walls. An Italian transmitter, located just across the Adriatic Sea, broadcast its signal to over 10% of Albanian territory (Figure 1). Starting in the early 1970s, as TV sets became widespread in Albania, locals enthusiastically chose Italian channels over their national broadcaster. The entertaining nature of Italian programming, which was missing from Albania’s national broadcaster, captivated domestic viewers. And while Albanian TV aired for only four hours a day, Italian shows were available around the clock. The Italian language was drifting across the sea – all day, every day.
Figure 1: Exposure to Italian TV in Albania, by region
Source: authors’ calculations
The Albanian communist regime lasted until 1990, when it then fell abruptly. Suddenly free to emigrate, hundreds of thousands of Albanians moved country: within ten years, 25% of the population had emigrated (around 700,000 people in total). They headed primarily to Italy and Greece.
In our recent paper we explore what role access to Italian television may have played in shaping the migration choices of Albanian people. This provides us with insights into a broader question: how does access to foreign media affect international migration?
A unique setting
Infrastructure plays a big part in our story. When building a transmitter, broadcasting companies typically position antennas to target densely populated areas (ideally full of people interested in their programmes). Similarly, viewers often consider TV signal or internet availability when choosing where to live. This means that those with access to TV and those without can differ substantially in various aspects besides media access. For example, people living in urban, isolated, or mountainous areas tend to differ in many ways beyond just TV signal access. This makes it problematic to compare exposed and unexposed groups when trying to evaluate the effects of TV exposure on individual choices.
But the case of access to the Italian signal is unique: the transmitter was not positioned with the intention to meet Albanian needs. Instead, the broadcasts drifted across the Adriatic by accident. And due to the centrally planned nature of the Albanian economy, residents could not strategically relocate to areas with better signal, nor could they emigrate due to migration bans. So, in this setting, exposed and non-exposed individuals should be similar in all respects except for access to Italian TV shows.
As shown in Figure 1, the TV signal is stronger in coastal areas (due to proximity to the transmitter over in Italy). To ensure a proper comparison between exposed and non-exposed groups, in our paper we compare Albanians living in very close municipalities that differ only in TV exposure. This differential exposure is solely due to the presence of obstacles in the line of sight between a municipality and the transmitter, which should not affect individual characteristics other than TV signal quality. The idea here is to isolate the impact of Italian TV access, rather than capture other factors that might alter the choices made by different households.
The effect of Italian TV on Albanians
Access to Italian TV increased the Italian language proficiency of Albanians. At the end of the communist regime, there was a seven percentage point higher share of inhabitants able to speak proficient Italian in municipalities with access to the foreign TV shows compared with areas without. This effect was sizeable, given that at the time the overall share of Italian speakers in Albania was only around 5%.
In the 15 years following the fall of the regime, exposure to Italian TV also affected migration choices, and did so very differently depending on a person’s skills/education level (or ‘human capital’). Access to Italian TV increased the probability of migration for university-educated Albanians by 26 percentage points and their probability of migrating specifically to Italy by 22 percentage points. In contrast, foreign TV exposure did not affect the likelihood of non-university-educated Albanians moving abroad. But it did increase their probability of choosing Italy as a destination by three percentage points, if they decided to migrate.
We find that TV exposure influences migration decisions primarily by improving Italian language proficiency. This relationship remains robust even after accounting for alternative factors––such as shifts in individuals’ ‘information set’ (i.e., the information available to a person)––through which foreign media might affect migration. Notably, the Italian programmes watched by Albanians contained no significant economic information that could facilitate migration.
What can we learn from this story?
The first takeaway from this episode is that exposure to foreign media can significantly enhance foreign language proficiency. In Albania, Italian television was the sole source of exposure to the Italian language; today, however, foreign media platforms—bolstered by a wide range of language-learning resources—are likely to have an even greater impact.
Second, by influencing foreign language proficiency, foreign media exposure can shape international migration, with effects varying by individuals’ skills and education levels. This is because language skills ‘enhance migration returns’, making a person’s skills transferrable to a new country. High-skilled professionals, such as lawyers, doctors or economists, rely heavily on reading, writing and verbal communication. This makes it nearly impossible to practice in a country where they do not speak the native language. In contrast, lower-skilled workers, like construction workers or farmers, can leverage their skills with minimal language proficiency.
A person’s education level has a large effect on how foreign media can shape their migration choices. Multilingualism doesn’t offer the same benefits to all workers.
Concluding remarks
Our paper provides insights into how foreign media exposure fosters plurilingualism and shapes migration flows, particularly by increasing the mobility of high-skilled workers.
The episode we studied is highly specific: in our case, foreign media exposure primarily influenced language skills without significantly affecting other relevant individual characteristics. But in today’s context, exposure to foreign media is likely to have far-reaching effects beyond language acquisition, making further research into the implications of this increasingly pervasive phenomenon very valuable.
A key takeaway from our findings is the critical role of language in worker mobility. It is a stark reminder of how linguistic barriers can hinder the optimal allocation of labour. This issue is particularly relevant in the European Union (EU), where a single labour market remains fragmented by language differences. To what extent do linguistic barriers impede labour mobility within the EU, and what would be the economic gains of increasing plurilingualism or adopting a common international working language? This column bets that the gains would be substantial, but we will have to wait for future research to quantify them.
Authors: Damiano Argan and Anatole Cheysson