STANOVC, Kosovo — The extended Cakaj family has built a few dozen homes here, along Tony Blair Street, between the Dubai supermarket and the French peacekeepers base, in a clannish faith that closeness would bring security. But recently the family of Kosovo Albanians has begun to splinter, as a disastrous economy, static politics and a newly created opening in the border with Serbia have enticed tens of thousands of Kosovars to leave their troubled land in search of opportunity and work.

“My son had no choice,” said Xhevat Cakaj, but to leave their enclave for Germany with his wife and their five girls. They had only one cow, he said, whose milk they sold in a market in nearby Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, and their only other source of income was running a minibus service until the local authorities clamped down.

Squinting to survey the land where his family hid from the Serbs in the 1999 war, he wept at the irony of fate. “No one leaves for pleasure,” said Mr. Cakaj, 64.

Afrim Syla, 48, of Pristina, who makes pancakes for a living and recently had a son join the exodus, concurred: Once, Kosovars were laying down their lives to stay here. “Now,” he said, “we have come to a situation where we leave of our own free will.”