| 01.02.2007 Since Romania's accession into the EU on 1 January 2007 a number of Moldovan citizens who have submitted applications for the Romanian citizenship has raised drastically. In a speech in Chisinau on 16 January 2007, the Romanian President Traian Basescu said there were nearly twice as many applications pending for citizenship from Moldova. "There are still 530,000 people waiting to hand in their citizenship requests. And out of those which have already been handed in to the Romanian Embassy in Chisinau, the majority concern at least two people - if not three or even four," Basescu said. "By our evaluation, this means that there are, realistically speaking, around 700,000 or 800,000 requests for Romanian citizenship." Concerns about mass Moldovan migration into the EU have been further inflamed by the large number of Moldovans already working abroad who regularly transfer electronically their earnings to their home county. The International Monetary Fund estimates that a quarter of Moldova's economically active population works outside of the country. In a survey conducted in 2006 by the IMAS-INC Chisinau polling agency revealed that 48 percent of Moldovans would get a Romanian passport if they could, and 85 percent of those people said they would use the passport to work in the EU. | 
