title: “Down The Drain” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-20” author: “Hermelinda Kerby”
an economist at the Latvian Academy of Sciences. “But when I see these flights, I want to cry.”
The sheer scale of the exodus–mainly to Britain and Ireland, among the first countries to open their doors–far exceeds the expert predictions that circulated in the run-up to the EU’s expansion. Exact figures are scarce but up to 120,000 Lithuanians are thought to be living in Ireland alone, helping to maintain the Irish construction boom. Poland has lost one in ten of its doctors, and around half a million of its citizens now live in Britain. According to British government statistics, at least 37,000 Slovaks have found jobs in the country since 2004, with more than a third taking administrative or management posts.
A generation that grew up in the trying years of post-communist austerity is tired of waiting for the better jobs and higher living standards that the market economy was supposed to bring. Some qualified professionals are ready to take low-grade work, at least to start with, if it buys access to the West. “It’s easier to find work in Britain and life is just a lot more interesting,” says 25-year-old Nik, a Lithuanian IT graduate now working in a London wine store. Clearly his contemporaries feel much the same. Half of his college business-adminis-tration class, he reckons, have already headed abroad.
The big fear, of course, is that emigration will check economic growth or, worse, become self-reinforcing. Remove the most enterprising and best educated members of the new generation, perhaps forever, and any economy would suffer. To be sure, migration tempts all classes. But surveys suggest that graduates often figure disproportionately. “It can be a vicious circle,” says Caglar Ozden, a migration expert at the World Bank in Washington. “You lose your intellectual elite so more people tend to leave.”
The exodus is accelerating the emptying of a region where population was already in decline. Latvia, with among the lowest birthrates in Europe, could see its population halve by 2050, according to a forecast from the national bank. Meanwhile, sociologists fret over the long-term implications for the thousands of children left in grandparents’ care while mothers and fathers are picking mushrooms in Ireland or pouring lattes in London cafés. That’s not to mention the effect on national pride. The scale of Latvia’s problem was brought home when the country’s star Olympic biathlete Jekabs Nakums announced on television last year that he was leaving for a job cleaning cars in Ireland.
Already, acute shortages of skilled labor are emerging in key services and industries in Eastern Europe. The foreign investors needed to sustain economic revival want smart new offices and smart personnel, who are tough to supply when the good money has lured so many West. Poland has an unemployment rate of 16 percent but a shortage of skilled workers: Earlier this year the Polish pub-lic was shocked to learn that welders from North Korea were working in the shipyards of Gdansk, birthplace of the Solidarity movement that toppled communist rule.
A partial solution is available across the border. If wages are low in much of Eastern Europe, they’re lower still farther east. And forward-looking governments are adjusting policy fast. Three years ago, for example, the Czech Republic launched a pilot scheme to attract skilled workers from Bulgaria, Ukraine and Croatia. “Twenty years ago we gazed as poor people across the border to Germany; now eastern countries are looking at us in a similar way,” says Jiri Sova of Grafton Technologies, a recruitment agency in Prague that scouts the former East Bloc for talent.
Things aren’t quite so simple, however. As ever in Eastern Europe, historical sensitivities confuse the picture. The richest and closest source of migrant labor is often Russia and the other former states of the Soviet Union. But in the Baltic states and elsewhere, memories of Soviet domination are still fresh enough to make any such recruits unwelcome. In Latvia, the possible loosening of rules on immigration is likely to emerge as a political issue when the country goes to the polls in the fall.
Meanwhile, remittances offer some small consolation. Dutiful children are sending back billions of euros to prop up family finances, build houses or fund their own children’s higher education. Convenience–and fears of the taxman–means plenty of money reaches home in unrecorded cash. In extreme cases such payments are supporting entire economies. In Moldova, the rundown former Soviet republic on the edge of the EU where up to 15 percent of the work force now labors abroad, remittances account for 27 percent of GDP. On the other hand, studies suggest that most of this money will be splurged on consumer goods rather than worthwhile investment. “The higher demand in Moldova has just forced up inflation and undermined the currency,” says Kristof Tamas, a migration expert at the Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm. The example of the struggling nations that depend most heavily on remittances, like the Philippines or Egypt, makes a poor advertisement for relying on the generosity of one’s countrymen abroad. In the blunt words of a World Bank report last year: “Remittances should not be seen as a substitute for development.”
Of course, development could continue to quicken if the migration phenomenon proves short-lived. According to the EU’s original forecasts, those bright young easterners will spend a year or two abroad to hone their language skills before returning home with some useful commercial savvy and a new international outlook, a wholly positive view of migration strongly endorsed by both Brussels and the United Nations. Sure, their home countries might lose their services for a while but one fortunate legacy of communist rule is a college system that still turns out an oversupply of graduates.
Trouble is, it’s looking as if plenty may choose to stay away indefinitely. “In all the discussion there was an assumption that this would be temporary,” says Martin Ruhs of the Center on Migration Policy and Society at Oxford University. “But it’s a mistake to assume that all these people will go home.” So far there’s little dependable data but a poll earlier this year of migrant workers in the farmlands of eastern England found that more than half intended to remain in Britain long-term. For the most part, migrants have found little difficulty in integrating and work is plentiful. “Many people come over here for a year, change their minds and just stay on,” says Marcin Kuszewski, who’s now working in a Polish grocery in West London. Given the money he’s making, why not? In three years, he’s already earned enough to build a house back in Poland.
The only certain bait for the potential returnees would be closing of the East-West pay gap. As of yet, wages across the region have failed to keep pace with those soaring growth rates. A newly qualified Hungarian doctor can’t hope to earn more than € €500 a month, less than a quarter of the average salary of their counterparts in the United Kingdom; one recent survey suggested that 60 percent of Hungarian med-ical students approaching graduation were intending to seek work outside the country.
That said, the real clincher for immigrants pondering a return could often be sentiment as much as money. “Here I will always be a foreigner, a small fish in a big pond,” says Heli Viira, a 33-year-old Estonian who came to Britain as an au pair but went on to qualify as a psychologist. As the Estonian economy strengthens, she’s now thinking of a job back home. Smart governments will find ways to play on those sentiments: a recent report for the Latvian authorities suggested that offering an online education in Latvian to migrants’ children in Ireland could keep alive links to the home country even in the next generation. Establish that sentimental tie and there’s always the chance the migrant–or his children–will return to his roots. Patriotic yearnings die hard. Just ask the Irish.
