The Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology carried out a poll last year, asking among other things whether Ukrainians were prepared to make sacrifices and how in order to make big money. Some of the respondents made sensational statements (the questionnaires allowed several responses), ranging from sacrificing friendships to breaking the law, yet most preferred ways to earn money legally. 52.6% were prepared to work morning to night with no days off; 47.9% would not turn down any well paid jobs. Labor migration joined the top three: 46.9% Ukrainians were prepared and willing to leave Ukraine and work abroad.
EVERY FIFTH ABLE-BODIED INDIVIDUAL WORKS ABROAD
Naturally, the actual number of working migrants is smaller by far; the most liberal estimates point to seven million — in other words, every fifth able-bodied and enterprising Ukrainian is employed outside this country. Trying to assess the number of Ukrainians among forty million working migrant laborers would be very difficult. The State Border Protection Committee (Derzhkomkordon), for example, says only 105 Ukrainians immigrated to Portugal in 2000-02, while Portuguese media report over 200,000 Ukrainians laboring in that country — and this is considering that the Ukrainian Labor and Social Policy Ministry offers statistics that Portugal is highly unattractive to Ukrainian labor force. In contrast, Greece is supposed to have 7,249 Ukrainians working, followed by Cyprus (2,914 Ukrainians), Liberia (2,266), Great Britain (1,287), the United Arab Emirates (703), Germany (551), and Russia (543). Unofficial estimates, however, read that a mere 5% of such Ukrainians are officially registered with the ULSPM. The Ukrainian Ombudsman says that only 14% of Ukrainian nationals actually working in Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey are officially recorded here.
The Institute of Sociology recently tried to produce a social- psychological profile of such Ukrainian migrants. It showed that most such individuals were males averaging 33 years of age coming from small towns (42%) or villages (29%), more often than not somewhere in western Ukraine. In 50% of such cases these people made oral foreign employment arrangements. Yet those without this experience could only envy such labor migrant’s standard of living. The said migrants are 1.6 times less fatalistic, with almost the same increment in terms of enterprising and self-confident individuals; they show 1.7 times more support for privatization and see their futures in Ukraine’s active cooperation with its Western neighbors than those who remain here.
HISTORY OF ONE BUSINESS
However, life stories, rather than statistics, are evidence that such migrants return to Ukraine as completely different individuals. Oleksiy Kryvulchenko could be correctly considered the first Ukrainian migrant laborer (he traveled to Italy in 1992). He says that trip marked a breakthrough in his life, for he went there as a typical Soviet product, an individual unsure of anything and haunted by a host of inferiority complexes, but that he returned a confident and aspiring businessman. True, his Italian memories can be interpreted several ways. On the one hand, he has close friends in Italy; on the other hand, he can vividly remember his small unheated room, his aching joints as he tossed and turned in his bed after each day of backbreaking toil, and his ruthless and cheating employers.
Indeed, he went to Italy after weighing the pros and cons. It was his conscious choice, for by then he saw no alternative but starving to death. He was a trained historian and his parents had not received wages for eight months. He had to visit his friends in the countryside to buy meat. In the summer, he borrowed $80 from some of them and made a trip to the Crimea to try to do business selling shrimps. He was lucky as the local vacationers’ market demand turned out spectacular. His starting capital grew tenfold, enough to buy a tourist trip to Slovenia. From there, Oleksiy expected that reaching the cherished border would not be a problem. He knew Italian rather well.
It was the exact opposite. His first meeting with the hot-tempered nation ended with Oleksiy being thrown into an immigration detention cell. He was kept there for twelve hours, then deported to Slovenia. “Apparently, I failed to convince the customs authorities that I had good intentions,” he recalls, “and my command of the Italian language did not make the situation any better, although every nation is supposed to be pleased to have foreigners visiting and knowing its language.” The next attempt proved successful. That time customs officers saw a well-dressed and otherwise respectable-looking young fellow who told them in pure English that he was on a junket having to do with university affairs. True, when he got off the train in Venice he found no one waiting to meet him, contrary to prior arrangements. Now he recalls that he spent eight hours in the waiting room, with only fifteen dollars to his name, and that he then saw all his previous life flash before his eyes. “I felt that I’d had it, that it was the end; I couldn’t stay there and I couldn’t make it back to Ukraine. Death seemed the only alternative.” But the situation turned out to be not so bleak as it seemed. People finally arrived to meet Oleksiy, but the actual conditions of his employment turned out very different from those he had been promised.
In four months working in Italy, he had to learn many things, sorting out frozen strawberries, parking cars properly in the lot of a major nightclub, filling glasses with wine high up in the mountains, and even riding a trailer raking soil along a ditch. “I was close to death twice,” says Oleksiy. “Once when that trailer turned over and I had an instant to jump off, otherwise it would land on top of me in the ditch and I’d surely have been killed. Another time I faced lethal blood poisoning.” It was a wound on one of his fingers, inflicted in line of duty, developing an abscess. Illegal laborers like him cannot use official health plans, of course, so he asked his employer to find him a doctor. The Italian examined Oleksiy’s swollen finger and said, “Big deal! Just have it cut off.” In the end, he had to cut it open and heal it himself, whereupon his Italian colleagues started treating him as though he were a kind of weirdo, saying to themselves, look at that Russian: he can cut himself, who knows what he’ll do next, better stay clear of him.
Paid three dollars an hour, Oleksiy had to live on scarce food to save money over those months. “I can still remember ordering the cheapest macaroni for breakfast, and then ordering the same for lunch, but with some butter, and then the same thing for supper, but with a fried egg,” he recalls. Local residents had no idea about which country he had come from, but they knew he could do surgery on himself, so many tried to lend him a hand. Women brought preserves, pancakes, telling him he should eat more and better food, working so hard.
In fact, those well-wishers have remained his friends. Oleksiy started a business after returning to Ukraine, so now he can afford trips to Italy off and on simply to visit friends and go to birthday parties. He says that his original experience in that country [as an illegal laborer] helped him learn something he did not know about himself. He gained experience in surmounting unexpected obstacles, and that experience has positively affected his subsequent endeavors. Somehow, he no longer fears hopeless situations. One thing remains, however: feeling unwanted. “It’s when you feel nobody cares about you, about what happens to you next; this can be erased by neither success, nor a loving family, nor friends who really care.”
HOW TO MAINTAIN THE MIGRATION BALANCE
Oleksandr Khomra, Head of the National Security and Defense Council’s Department on Socioeconomic and Demographic Security, believes that Ukraine could receive dividends from such labor migration after some years. As it is, what money these people bring to Ukraine serves to replenish the shadow economy, never the official one. At different times in the past, such labor migration was the only effective remedy for a number of ailing states like Italy, Greece, and Yugoslavia. At first, people began to leave those countries, searching for better-paid jobs in Western Europe. Now they are the main beneficiaries of this labor pool. Yugoslavia, for example, worked out special migrant employment programs to make use of this labor pool. Thus, whoever wanted to start a business there was entitled to loans at the lowest possible interest rate, as well as to currency import tax concessions.
Experts believe that such migrant labor brings some $400 million to Ukraine every year. Thus, a poll dating from 2001 in Ternopil oblast points to $100 million in such migrant labor receipts a year. By way of comparison, the region’s direct foreign investment attraction program envisages only UAH 13.4 million (2%) worth of such a sum.
True, here one could assess the tangible and intangible losses incurred to the nation’s budget by money earned by Ukrainians working abroad. Thus, almost 30% of Ukrainian scientists are employed outside Ukraine. Experts believe that Ukraine is thus losing a billion dollars every year; ever ten discoveries based on Ukrainian groundwork have been patented in the United States over the past twelve years.
There are also dramatic stories about Ukrainian migrants. Ombudswoman Nina Karpachova says that 500 Ukrainian laborers died in Portugal alone during 2000-02, mostly from work-related accidents and suicide. Ms. Karpachova attributes this to the absence of safety and an extremely oppressive mental environment.
The situation is aggravated by population indices. While most of the countries that serve as major suppliers of labor are marked by a healthy natural population increment, Ukraine has registered a dramatic four million reduction in the past decade, with UN experts saying that at least 135 million such migrants should emerge on the international labor market for the EU countries to remain adequately competitive operators 25 years from now and that Ukraine will have a population numbering 42 million in 2026, considering this country’s unfavorable birth and immigration levels.
Ukrainian experts agree with their foreign counterparts. Mykola Yerukh, Head of the Nationalities and Migration State Committee’s Refugee and Migration Department, says that Ukraine is not as yet ranking with migration havens. Most such migrants from China, Afghanistan, Vietnam, or India, who choose Ukraine as a stopover, lack higher education. 75% of these people prove to have no idea whatsoever about [our] political life, and this means that any investment is out of the question. Citizens of the CIS states turning up as illegal migrants here are somewhat more productive, but these individuals set up small private enterprises and almost never contribute to this country’s industries.
In a word, the experts agree that Ukraine must improve its economic characteristics to maintain its exit-entry balance. In other words, this country must improve its image. So far the difference between the Ukrainian living standard and that in countries attracting Ukrainian migrant laborers remains significant. Thus, Portugal and Ukraine are respectively placed 30th and 102nd on UN adjusted per capita GDP lists, with Ukraine ranking close to Guatemala and Surinam.
