♦Ukrainians work in more then 70 countries, but most of them are found in 20-25 countries. Especially in Russia, Poland, Italy, Greece, Portugal, the Czech Republic.
♦ Now only 50 percent of all gastarbeiters works illegally.
♦ According to the NBU, in 2010 5.9 billion dollars came into Ukraine through a financial banking system, but real annual amounts of money transfers to Ukraine are about 25.6 billion dollars.
We need to provide all the necessary conditions for bringing working guests from abroad back to Ukraine. This statement was made by Prime Minister Mykola Azarov while summing up the twenty years of our country’s independence. “[20 years. – Author.] Is it a lot or a little? Were we able to create a modern country? Has this country become a cozy home, one that everybody wants to live in, for our people?” With these words the head of parliament summarized his speech before students. “Our answer will be clear and accurate: probably it has not. It surely hasn’t for those six million people who have to look for a place in the sun in other lands.” Azarov thinks that something should be done about labor migration.
Ukrainian citizens are urged to go abroad by a desire to improve their economic well-being. “Abroad an average Ukrainian makes from 2,000 to 2,500 dollars per month (from 500 dollars in Russia to 3,000 or 4,000 dollars in Ireland and Switzerland). There are hundreds of thousands of vacancies in Ukraine, but the salary is no more than a 1,500 hryvnias.” This is how the main motive of labor migration is explained to The Day by Andrii Haidutsky, Ph.D. in economics, assistant director, Ukreximbank Directory for Retail Business Organization.
“I have studied to become a hydrologist and I loved my job but the salary was not enough to even provide the necessities. That’s why I’ve been working in Italy for 10 years now,” Larysa, a gastarbeiter, confirms what was said by the expert as she tells The Day her story. First she thought that it was going to last for a year or two, but now she decided that it’s forever. “After legalization I come home for a month or two every year. I’m very disappointed with what I see here. The situation is getting worse and worse. Even groceries in Ukraine are significantly more expensive than in Italy. And you have to take into consideration that the salaries in Ukraine are smaller than European unemployment benefits!” says the guest worker with sadness in her voice. The woman tells that when Yushchenko rose to power in 2004 a lot of Ukrainians in Italy hoped that they would be able to come back home soon. “But Yushchenko disregarded a huge amount of trust and didn’t do a thing for the people. I don’t believe that another politician can do this because there is a lot to change,” she says.
Then gastarbeiter Anatolii told The Day the story of his ordeals. “I worked abroad for three years: in France, Germany, and Italy. My wife is still working in Italy and my daughter and her husband have decided to stay in Spain permanently. My grandchildren were born there. And though they are being brought up according to Ukrainian traditions and they know Ukrainian (they came to visit me in Chernivtsi in summer), I understand that they won’t be coming back home. There’s way too much that needs to be changed for that.” According to Anatolii, both of his children, who got higher education, became blue-collar workers. “The money they earn is enough to get a loan for a decent apartment at an unbelievable for Ukraine three percent of interest. Besides, they don’t limit themselves in anything, they were even able to afford the trip across Europe, and they didn’t cut down the expenses here either,” says Anatolii. And when the daughter gave birth to her baby in Spain, it didn’t cost her anything. Today his older grandson goes to school, but the parents don’t even know about things like “voluntary donations.” “My son-in-law said that he is going to start his own business: state supports entrepreneurs with easy loans and frees them from paying taxes in the beginning. In Ukraine these things are only promised before elections. My wife is not in a hurry to get home as well. Being an honorable teacher here, over there she’s just a cook. But she’s earning money for retirement. She will lead a miserable life with a pension she gets in Ukraine, but what she earns in Italy will be enough for her to live decently,” he summed up.
Every year the number of Ukrainians who are willing to flee Ukraine in search of a better life is only growing. “According to our research, the number of Ukrainians working (or staying permanently for other reasons) abroad is about five million. Overall, Ukrainians work in more then 70 countries, but most of them are found in 20-25 countries. The greatest part is in Russia, up to two million people. There’s up to one million in Poland, half a million in Italy, 350,000 in Greece, 200,000 in Portugal, 130,000 in the Czech Republic, etc.,” says Haidutsky.
It’s too early to talk about the disastrous effect of labor migration, tells The Day Oleksii Pozniak, Ph.D. in economy, director of migration research at the Ptukha Institute of Demography and Social Studies, the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences. But he believes the scale of this phenomenon to be quite serious. According to Pozniak’s estimate, if at the beginning of this century 85 percent of all gastarbeiters worked illegally, now this index is 50 to 50 percent.
Meanwhile, Volodymyr Chepovy, director, the Institute of Ukrainian Studies, revealed another aspect of guest workers problem to The Day. “According to the latest research, 60 percent of young people intend to leave Ukraine because their dreams can’t come true here. And the main task of any government is to organize the environment in which citizens will be able to successfully pursue their dreams. That’s when people will stop leaving the country. Right now this is the main problem,” he resumes.
In Larysa’s opinion, to set the situation right, the all-out plundering of the country needs to be stopped and officials’ appetites have to be limited. “Officials steal elsewhere in the world, but nowhere do they steal more than a half of the country’s GDP. In Europe even a teacher, who becomes member of parliament, loses some of his salary, but our MPs only gain,” she says. We also need to eliminate corruption, the guest worker goes on, because the society has degraded morally on account of it. “Even intellectuals, professors at universities are infected with corruption: what can they teach our youth? People need decent salaries, so everyone stops thinking what else can they steal at work to have money for more than paying household bills and buying the basic food, and starts fulfilling their duties,” says Larysa. Besides, destroying of the nation with low-quality groceries needs to be stopped. “Ukraine has a potential to become a world producer of ecologically safe and therefore very valuable products in the world market. Instead of that people are fed with goodness knows what. I realized this during this year’s vacation. I usually have a yoghurt for breakfast in Italy, but you do have to stretch a point to use the word “yoghurt” for what I got at the supermarket in Chernivtsi. The same applies to the rest of groceries,” she said.
According to Pozniak, raising the level of living is not enough to bring guest workers back. It is vital to promote the ability of small business development in Ukraine. “If a person knows they will be able to invest the money they earn into their own business and have a profit, then they will go back home,” this is how the expert designates the first condition. A program of migrants adaptation should work simultaneously, because the people who have been working abroad for five to seven years will be coming back into a totally different society comparing to the one they left.
Chepovy advises the government to do one thing only: let small business develop. “The fact that small entrepreneurs’ progress is being impeded is very negative in a strategical sense. Because small will become middle at some point of time and then will grow into large business. But if you pinch small business in the bud, nothing will grow out of it. And if these incredibly active people are not able to implement their plans at home, they will leave the country,” he sums up.
Haidutsky offers to add world experience to this list. For example, in Mexico there are “3x1” programs working. The point is that to every dollar that a migrant wants to invest in business or a social project in their home country, Mexico adds three dollars (one from federal, one from state, and one from district budgets). An average size of an investment project is about 40-60 thousand dollars. In India and Portugal, the Central Bank motivates other banks to open special deposit and checking accounts for migrants with a raised rate, the absence of profits taxation and an ability to repatriate the money freely. In Turkey special cooperatives for developing rural territories were made out of migrant households who developed agriculture. The State Industrial and Workers Investment Bank (DESIYAB) was created solely for this purpose. Overall, 45 (!) programs intended to draw migrants’ money tranfers were implemented from 1961 to 2003. And this experience should not be ignored, says Haidutsky, because the return of gastarbeiters is a good investment in economy. According to the World Bank, Ukrainian immigrants’ annual savings equal to approximately 10 billion dollars, which they keep abroad nowadays.
Therefore, a way to overcome the problem exists and it is tried out by other countries. But why doesn’t Ukraine accept it? Maybe the answer is that it is not only themselves that guest workers feed?
According to the NBU, in 2010 5.9 billion dollars came into Ukraine through a financial banking system, says Haidutsky. This is 10 percent more than in 2009 but five percent less than in a record 2008 year (6.2 billion dollars). However, Haidutsky thinks that real annual amounts of money transfers to Ukraine are about 25.6 billion dollars. Most of this money comes through unofficial channels: through couriers (bus and truck drivers, train conductors, other migrants, sales representatives, etc.) or through banking procedures that do not fall into money transfer category in reports (money withdrawal from debit cards, traveller’s cheques, Internet systems of transfers, etc.). On average, one migrant transfers about 430 dollars, says Haidutsky. But the latest statistics of money transfer systems show that in 2010 this index reached 500-600 dollars. So, if we calculate according to the NBU 2010 official statictics, says the expert, money transfers to Ukraine constitute 4.2 percent of the GDP. “But if you use our data which are more complete, it’s almost 18 percent of the GDP in 2010,” he tells to The Day. Just to compare, according to the World Bank data, in Tadjikistan a money tranfer share in the GDP comprises 35 percent, in Moldova 23 percent, in Kyrgyzstan 15 percent, in Bosnia and Herzegovina,14 percent.
On the other hand, Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Social Policy Serhii Tihipko calls work migration an inevitable effect of globalization, as well as the migration of capitals. That is why governments should not fight this phenomenon. Instead, they must attempt to legalize it and simplify all the procedures. So Tihipko supports the legalization of gastarbeiters’ work abroad. At the beginning of this year he even signed a Memorandum about cooperation in work migration between the Ministry of Social Policy of Ukraine and the Federal Migration Service of the Russian Federation. The document provided for creating conditions for complex social defense of guest workers. “According to our estimations, less than 10 percent out of 3.5 million of Ukrainians working in Russia seasonly or permanently, do it legally. The main reason for that is the difficulty of getting an official permit for work. Our goal is to free these procedures from the unnecessary red tape,” explained Tihipko. He also added that if a citizen works abroad and the country does not know about it, they deprive themselves of their own country’s protection. “I think that the experience of evacuation from Libya and Japan and examples of Ukrainians becoming slaves in Thailand, Turkey and other countries have to teach everyone that it’s better to pay taxes and work abroad legally. Sometimes it just saves lives,” he underlined.
Moreover, the experts say that another aspect besides legalization should not be forgotten. Ella Lianova, director of the Institute of Demography and Social Studies, thinks that if it is possible to secure a simplified visa system with the EU, it will work for Ukraine’s benefit because it will make it easier for migrants to come back.
But you should not count on immigrants to return in this case, says Pozniak. According to him, all the migrants can be divided into short-term (the ones that work in Russia, the Czech Republic, Poland, or Hungary seasonally) and long-term (working in Spain, Portugal, and Italy). The former traditionally come back home, while the latter do that only partially, adds the expert. During the last years there has been a tendency for a decrease in the number of those long-term migrants who are willing to come back home. “World practice shows that the longer a person has stayed abroad, even if they intended to come back soon, the smaller is the chance of them coming back,” Pozniak explains. That’s why we have to realize clearly that a part of them will never come back.
Haidutsky supports him by saying that our fellow citizens will continue to travel abroad, first of all to Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, because work force goes from these countries further to the West (to the countries of the EU-15 and the US). “And after the visa system cancellation about two to trhee million Ukrainians will move out in two years as well. This happened to Poland and Romania: upon their joining the EU, a lot of Poles moved to Great Britain, Ireland and Switzerland, while Romanians moved to Italy and Spain,” he says. The expert forecasts that in the future Ukraine is destined to experience the same thing that happened to most of the countries of the EU and the US: the population will increase due to immigrants and their future generations and not thanks to the increase in the birth rate of Ukrainians. He says that if in 2005 in Ukraine the increase of immigrants compensated the negative population growth (birth rate minus death rate) only by 1.2 percent, in 2010 the level of this compensation equalled to almost 10 percent. “Therefore, in 7-10 years in Ukraine the decrease of population will stop and the increase will start again,” Haidutsky adds.
