Long Live Emigration?
Preliminary data of a study by UN demography researchers (final assessments are expected later in March) have come like a bolt from the blue: to preserve the current ratio between the employed population and pensioners alone, European Union countries must import 159 million immigrants over the next 25 years. Well- fed, complacent, and comfortable Europe simply has no alternative, the UN population department believes, no matter how unacceptable, especially politically, this may seem in each West European country. The reason is simple: owing to the successes of medicine and social policies, the global population is steadily aging, while birth rates are continuously falling. Both things are occurring, first of all, at the expense of Germany, France, Italy, and other developed states.
The point is also, among other things, the fact that in the past twenty-five years Western Europe has been turning into a veritable fortress as a result of a powerful economic crisis. New legislative acts, still in force, have radically reduced the maximum acceptable inflow of immigrants, with a respite being given (not to all countries) only during the Balkan wars. By then, there were already powerful economies in Germany and France based on the labor of Turks, Portuguese, Italians, Arabs, Poles, and citizens of the former Yugoslavia. It is an open secret that it is thanks to immigrants that the Ruhr coal basin in Germany was raised from ruin. Quite recently, a great number of households in such European Union countries as Italy, Spain, and Portugal could only survive thanks to their men working in Germany and France, which were at that time much more attractive to live in.
Since then these countries have gradually become recipients of flows of immigrants.
And since then, only Turkey (now a potential candidate for EU membership) and the Maghreb countries (Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco) have concluded employment agreements with EU countries, which stipulate that workers from these countries enjoy the same rights as the Europeans. It is obvious that the main migration flows will come precisely from these countries.
The point is that, for instance, the EU association agreements of Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, and the Baltic states do not provide even the faintest idea of this: they only lay down quotas under bilateral agreements, which does not stem the tide of illegal immigration and employment.
As to a Ukrainian, it is extremely difficult for him/her to get a job in the West on a legal basis, for no relevant normative instruments exist. And all current indications are that they will not appear in the near future.
Western Europe seems to have not so wide a choice now: either to open again the doors to a new tide of immigrants, overcoming, above all, psychological fear and xenophobia traditional for remote countries, and the desire to further exist in a comfortable closed space, or to get ready for a wave of its already forgotten economic crises and social explosions caused by the inevitable cutbacks of social programs so well developed now.
Or they should find a non-standard way out of a real-life situation, but it is nonstandard thinking that the West seems to lack today to a large extent. As to Ukraine’s possible contribution to the solution of the Western demographic crisis, I would rather remain silent.
