Taras Kuzio’s Blog

Immigrants and EU Membership

Over Christmas and the New Year when I was visiting Britain the newspaper headlines seemed full of foreboding about the pending membership of Romania and Bulgaria in the EU in January. Headlines competed with one another about the likelihood of Britain being overwhelmed by thousands of illegal migrants from these two countries.
The headlines were surprising as Britain, along with Ireland and Sweden, had been one of the few Western European EU members which had open borders after the EU enlarged in 2004 to include eight new post-communist states. Since then, there has been a large inflow of migrants from these countries into Britain and Ireland, to the extent that there are labour shortages of young people in Poland.
Britain has taken in approximately 600,000 Poles, a huge number when one considers that most of them will have stayed in the prosperous south east of England. But, not only there. On holiday in my own Yorkshire, a region 250 miles (400 kilometres) north of London, we came across Poles working in remote hotels and restaurants.
Even in my relatively small town of Halifax there is now an “East European Foods” shop that has painted under this sign “Russian-Polish-Lithuanian foods”. We visited the shop to see what they sold – most of the foods were from Russia, as was the sales assistant who seemed out of place in his sport costume and short haircut.
The shop is a reflection of how migrants from Eastern Europe and the former USSR have spread out throughout England. Until the 1990s, Halifax’s eastern Europeans were post-1945 political refugees from Ukraine, Poland and Latvia. Today, it would seem there are now Russians. We did not have the heart to tell the young sportly shop assistant that Ukrainian nationalist émigrés in Halifax, the largest East European diaspora in the town, would never shop in a place which advertised itself as “Russian”.
The integration of Romania and Bulgaria into the EU is stated to be the last phase of EU enlargement. The only country that is discussed as an additional member in the near future is Croatia. Turkish membership is unpopular in France and Germany. If The centre-right presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy wins the French presidential elections in March, Turkey will never join.
What then of Ukraine? Although Ukraine is not Muslim, it is still a similarly large enough problem for the EU to consider as a future member. 48 million is not the same as 100 million, Turkeys projected population size by the middle of the century, but is still big. All of the East European new members, apart from Poland, had small populations.
Even though EU membership seems far off for Ukraine the reality is that there are millions of migrants from Ukraine already in the EU. At a conference in Italy in May the head of an Italian think tank told us that the majority of nannies looking after Italian children are Ukrainian women! Ukrainian migrants are in big demand in Greece, Portugal, England, Italy and elsewhere because they are reliable and hard working.
These millions of migrants are having a positive impact back inside Ukraine. In October I was part of a team assessing US government assistance to Ukraine. During the assessment we traveled extensively around western and central Ukraine. Many of its cities and towns have huge injections of cash from migrants working abroad, money which is translated into new homes and businesses. The small and medium business sector is booming in this region of Ukraine and is helping to buttress civil society and democratic local government development. Small new private hotels are everywhere breaking the monopoly of the old Intourist hotels.
EU membership has been a Ukrainian government objective since 1998 but it still seems far away. Unlike NATO membership, EU membership is not unpopular in Ukraine. Even former oligarchs, such as Viktor Pinchuk, back EU membership. In 2004 he launched his Yalta European Strategy (www.yes-ukraine.org) to lobby EU elites to change their attitudes to Ukraine. Ukraine’s politicians though, seem more pre-occupied with in-fighting and seeking power than important foreign policy objectives, such as EU or NATO membership.