Oddly enough, the echo of ethnic clashes in Moscow’s Biryulevo and the upcoming dialogue in Vilnius are linked with common problems. Watching pogroms in the center of the “Russian World,” Ukrainians begin to imagine the consequences of an uncivilized immigration policy. Meanwhile, Europe, which annually receives millions of job-seekers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, is interested in replacing them with continental neighbors, including Ukrainians. In the humanitarian sphere, so ticklish for both sides, Ukrainian interest coincides with European. But we do not use this resource – first of all, because we do not pursue a nationalities policy of our own. What’s the use growing tree branches without a trunk?
In an attempt to keep the Barbarians from penetrating into the Roman Empire, Emperor Hadrian decided to build a wall. Naturally, he failed to fence off the entire state. But Hadrian’s borderline has survived, as has the attempt to solve the problem of emigration. Wildly enthusiastic about a free worldwide movement of commodities, capitals, and cultures, our cunning civilization still takes a dim view of bustling humans. In a belief that border crossing upsets the idyllic picture of the world, we protect our own borderlines. Yet, by all accounts, it is emigration that brought us from Neanderthal realty to the current peaks of progress. The human race came out of the depths of Africa and spread over the globe thanks to three incentives: food, safety, and procreation. These are also in force today, making millions of people set out on a journey. And Ukraine is now a new corridor for them.
According to UNESCO (http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/10/the-dark-side-of-inter national-migration), more than 232 million people live and work outside their own countries. They annually remit 400 billion dollars. Emigration is now at an all-time high, and the cited amount is almost four times as large as aggregate annual aid to poor countries from the affluent ones. So the budget and the population of a huge, albeit often invisible, nomadic country is to be reckoned with.
A considerable part – up to 60 percent – of all the “nomads” settles in Europe and the US. These continents know better than anyone else the pluses and minuses of today’s main trend, the depth of the processes that change customary demographic landscapes, and have learned in some way to curb chaotic human displacements. The imported working hands and talented brains are channeled into proper economic sectors, while population growth boosts the consumer demand. On the other hand, the arrivals and nonresidents bring in a culture, religion, and customs that do not fit in with local traditions and create a host of ethnic, social, and criminal problems. The young Ukrainian state, which stands at the crossroads of cross-continent migration routes, has not yet learned to derive benefit from its geographical position and to control the flows of refugees. Having passed the readmission law in 2008, we have partially eased the headache of our European partners but still keep our own head in the guillotine.
In 2008 Maria Luptakova, a professor at the Prague-based Institute of Criminology and Social Prevention, studied the problems of migration in Ukraine. The materials of her work were published in a prestigious European journal and still remain topical (see http://www.sascv. org/ijcjs/marina.html).
On the basis of expert data (for example, a UN commission’s report which placed Ukraine fourth in the world in terms of the number of illegal transitory migrants), Ms. Luptakova concludes that there have been 800,000 to 1.6 million people since the beginning of this century, who illegally arrived in Ukraine from all over the world. The absolute number of illegal migrants in Ukraine exceeds 25-fold the European average of immigrant foreigners in a host country per one inhabitant of the host country, and this flow can only increase. At the time, the EU established Frontex, an agency for external border security. The fact that its headquarters is in Warsaw clearly shows the strategic nature of its activity. The EU has also set up the Schengen Information System (SIS) with a worldwide illegal migrant database and the Border Assistance Mission to Moldova and Ukraine (EUBAM). Naturally, all the projects are financed by Europe only. So what is our state, which is so deeply concerned about its security, doing to respond to the challenge of time?
We are lowering the level of security cooperation with Europe, having bogged down in debates on the advantages and disadvantages of alliances with the East and the West. The subject of illegal migration is coming of the focus of the media. They have not said even a word on this glaring problem since 2010, except for publishing some scanty official data at times. “According to statistics, in 2012, 68 percent of the migrants detained for illegal border crossing and other offences, came from the post-Soviet countries, mostly from Moldova (740), Georgia (219), Russia (119 – natives of Chechnya), Azerbaijan (92), Armenia (84), Uzbekistan (72), Tajikistan (59), Kyrgyzstan (50), and Kazakhstan (17),” one of these reports says (http://en.for-ua.com/comments/2013/08/21/122126.html).
I can neither deny nor believe this. Firstly, professionals know about seven main illegal routes through Ukraine: Afghan, Vietnamese, Chinese, Pakistani, Uzbek-Tajik, Chechen, and Sri Lankan. Why are these data based on only one – Uzbek-Tajik – route? Secondly, Western experts speak about tens of thousands of the arriving illegal migrants, while we say that only 1,452 were detained? Maria Luptakova’s study openly accuses Ukraine’s border security service of corruption. Have we eradicated it? Why has the border security agency gone out of public control? For we know about it less than about the Security Service. Migration waves in the wide expanses of Ukraine raise thousands of questions.
Can a Ukrainian state exist without a clearly marked and protected border? Can we draw it in the east without Europe’s assistance? Are experts right to value Ukrainian migration business at hundreds of millions of dollars? Why are we not pursuing strategic goals, when we receive economic and political refugees and turn granting citizenship into a purely technical procedure? Why do this country’s topmost officials not express their opinion about national unity and principles of humanitarian policy? Or the government has just no ideas about this matter and can only be guided by such landmarks as the Biryulevo riot in a complicated world of humanitarian problems exacerbated by the economic crisis?
