September the 22nd, 2026 – A new law facing foreign workers in Croatia as of 2027 is already causing a stir and facing criticism from migration experts.
You go to another country, get a job, learn around thirty basic phrases of its language and that is, according to the law, enough to be considered “integrated.” Most would argue that this statement is so ridiculous that it’s difficult to quantify. Poslovni reports that the aforementioned notion is all that will be required of foreign workers in Croatia as of 2027. They will have to prove knowledge of the Croatian language at level A1.1 in order to extend their residence and work permit. Apparently, that’s “integration”.
Is basic knowledge of a few dozen words really the same as integration into society? According to Ivan Balabanić, senior research associate at the Institute for Migration Research, the answer is very clearly “no.” The data that his institute collects shows that Croatia is only beginning to scratch the surface of a problem that, as the number of foreign workers grows, will become ever more complex. Balabanić views the obligation to pass A1.1 Croatian simultaneously as an integration measure and as an administrative condition, but emphasises that its meaning should primarily be integrative.
“Knowledge of the language of the country in which a person lives and works is one of the first preconditions for beginning to feel part of society. Nevertheless, such a low level of language knowledge by itself does not resolve questions of the legal security of foreign workers nor their finding their way in Croatian administration. Integration does not begin with a language course, but at the moment when a foreign worker knows their rights and can actually exercise them,” Balabanić highlighted.
croatia’s responsibility as a state
Precisely for that reason, while the worker hasn’t mastered Croatian, information about residence, work, the healthcare system and the protection of rights must be available to them in a language they understand, and that, Balabanić emphasises, in one place, and not scattered across a series of different institutions. Alongside economic integration, which in Croatia today mainly comes down to the relationship between the worker and the employer, the social dimension is equally important, and that, according to his words, cannot be one-way. Foreign workers need to get to know the norms and values of the society they are coming into, but the domestic population must also accept that Croatia is becoming culturally more diverse.
How weak that readiness is at this moment is shown by a study by the Institute for Migration Research from November 2025, conducted on a sample of 1,000 respondents: only 2.4 percent of citizens would accept a foreign worker as a friend, 5.7 percent as a neighbour, and as a family member only a negligible number of respondents. “That’s why I would say that Croatia is still in an early phase of the integration of foreign workers. Language is an important first step, but without legal security, available information, social contacts and the readiness of the domestic population to accept new fellow citizens we cannot speak of a serious integration policy,” Balabanić said. When it comes to the financing of integration, Balabanić clearly emphasises that the largest part of the cost should be borne by the state.
“The logic is simple: foreign workers come to Croatia primarily because of the needs of the domestic labour market and the shortage of labour in certain sectors. If the state creates a system that encourages the arrival of foreign workers, then it must also take on the largest part of the responsibility for their integration,” he is clear.
That, he emphasises, does not mean that the responsibility must be exclusively state. Local self-government has an important role because integration takes place in concrete communities – the needs of workers in Istria are not the same as the needs of those in Lika or Zagreb. Employers bear their share of responsibility within the work environment, but Balabanić warns that it would be wrong to shift the entire burden onto them, since they already bear significant costs of employing foreign workers. The least burden, he believes, should be shifted onto the workers themselves, although they too have the obligation to actively participate in integration by learning the language and respecting the law.
the so-called information vacuum
Precisely there Balabanić sees the real danger that integration becomes something that the state formally requires of the foreign worker, while at the same time not providing them with the tools to fulfil that requirement.
“It wouldn’t be logical for Croatia to actively attract foreign workers because its economy needs them, and then declare their integration exclusively their personal problem,” he said. When it comes to the biggest obstacles in the everyday life of foreign workers, Balabanić avoids singling out only one. The language barrier, inadequate accommodation, violation of labour rights, difficult access to healthcare and social isolation, he says, are intertwined – but the common denominator of most of these problems is the chronic lack of available and reliable information.
Croatia, he admits, is gradually responding regulatorily to the new situation; amendments to laws and regulations are being adopted, but the open question remains how many of them the administration manages to implement in practice. Tightened criteria for employers, for example, were supposed to regulate the market, but at the same time increased the administrative burden, so some workers waited months for the extension of their permit. A particular problem is the healthcare system – according to another study by the Institute from November 2025, conducted on 429 foreign workers from Asia and Africa in Zagreb and Zagreb County, only 28.7 percent of respondents have a chosen general practitioner, which seriously complicates regular health care.
Language remains an obstacle even when workers themselves try to find information, because the official websites of institutions are very often available exclusively in Croatian. Because of that many find themselves in what Balabanić calls an information vacuum, in which the main, sometimes the only, source of information becomes the employer or the employment agency. “A series of entirely practical questions, from whether the employer can keep the passport, whether they have the right to unemployment benefit, whom to turn to if their rights are violated – for a large number of workers remain without a reliable answer. Croatia today does not primarily lack regulations. It lacks a system that will enable the foreign worker to actually exercise the rights they have,” Balabanić highlighted.
financial burden
Particularly vulnerable, he warns, are workers in whom several unfavourable circumstances overlap – those who went into debt in order to reach Croatia at all through long chains of intermediaries, and therefore more readily accept poor working conditions, as well as those employed by an employer on whom they depend for salary, accommodation and information about their own rights. The education of children is for now not among the most pronounced problems, since a large part of labour migrants still live in Croatia without family, but with the growth in the number of those who stay long-term and bring families, that topic, Balabanić estimates, will become increasingly important.
