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07.08.09 Traditionalists fear workers\' migration is undermining Ukrainian society and liberals emphasize the advantages, but serious debate about the issue is lacking
Traditionalists fear workers\' migration is undermining Ukrainian society and liberals emphasize the advantages, but serious debate about the issue is lacking
by Kerstin Zimmer
All sides agree that labor migration is changing Ukrainian society, but serious debate on the issue is absent.
Several years ago Ukraine\'s then-president, Leonid Kuchma, referred to Ukrainian women working in Italy as prostitutes. Ever since, the public discourse on the role of labor migrants has become more intense and splintered.
In recent years, Ukraine has become one of the major labor exporting countries in Europe. This has left its mark on Ukrainian society and changed the perception of the labor migrants, the zarobitchany.
As both Russia and Ukraine\'s European Union neighbors developed their own policies on temporary emigration and immigration, Ukraine remained trapped in a zone of indecision. Its two biggest neighbors, Poland and Russia, see the need to attract workers from Ukraine and elsewhere to mitigate problems of aging populations and the shrinking pool of workers, but Ukraine seems unprepared to counter its own demographic crisis. Debate on migration in the media and politics is fragmented and tendentious, as proponents of different views prefer to deliver monologues on the topic rather than engage in real dialogue.
When they do talk about it, what Ukrainian experts and politicians alike often focus on is the number of migrants actually working abroad - estimates range from 2 million to about 7 million. While most scholars put forward rather conservative estimates, politicians seem to overstate the numbers of labor migrants. The argument over the \"real\" number of zarobitchany develops into a political fight, in which the zarobitchany become pieces in games played by competing forces. The political opposition uses high numbers as a hammer to bash government social and labor policies that fail to prevent people from (temporarily) leaving Ukraine, and it presents itself as the advocate of \"normal\" Ukrainians.
THE MODERN WAY TO MIGRATE
Under this surface, the public debate on labor migrants reveals the divergent orientations and development agendas politicians or groups have ready for Ukraine. While the Polish political and intellectual elite engages in a rather \"modern\" debate on the current demographic and the growing labor-market crisis, and Russia oscillates between modern and traditional ideas and politics, the dominant Ukrainian discourse is characterized by traditional and \"anti-modern\" elements.
People talk and think about labor migration largely in terms of people traveling west to work, yet the main recipient of such migration, Russia, hardly figures in public discussion. Official and permanent migration from Ukraine to Russia has dropped after peaking in the 1990s, but much undocumented migration continues. These migrants can easily and legally travel to Russia thanks to a visa-free policy, but most are illegally working without a permit. Workers in this group, estimated at about 1 million, come from all regions of Ukraine. Most are men who work predominantly in construction, especially in and around Moscow and other industrial centers.
One reason for the lack of concern with migration to Russia could be its perceived and unchallenged \"normality,\" because these zarobitchany are doing nothing new. Ukrainians have long worked in Russia on a temporary basis, mostly in the form of entire brigades, and well-established networks exist that facilitate this process. Some of these networks have a business character and some are intertwined with organized crime. What is largely unnoticed in the media is that most Ukrainians in Russia work in the shadow economy and that the present migration often takes place under much worse conditions than in Soviet times.
In contrast, labor migration to the countries of the European Union receives much more attention, thanks not only to its considerable extent but also to its distinct features and relative novelty. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry estimated several years ago that about 300,000 Ukrainians worked in Poland, 200,000 in Italy, up to 200,000 in the Czech Republic, 200,000 in Spain, and 150,000 in Portugal.
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jan2007/gb20070122_058176.htm
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05.08.10
