Contemporary international migration from Ukraine: trends and patterns (07/24/05)

Contemporary international migration from Ukraine: trends and patterns

by Serge Cipko

Recent reports concerning emigration from Ukraine have asserted that as many as 7 million citizens of that country currently are residing outside of its frontiers. It was this figure that a national deputy presented during an interview that discussed a draft bill delineating a "Concept of a National Policy Regarding Ukrainians Abroad."_1_ On May 24, Kyiv's Ukrainian News Agency, on announcing the creation of a national agency to handle migration-related matters, reported that "According to various data, the number of Ukrainians presently working abroad ranges from 5 million to 7 million."_2_

Whether it is 5 million or 7 million, either figure, if an accurate reflection of the current volume of out-migration from Ukraine, would suggest a movement that already has surpassed the scale of the exodus that took effect at the turn of the 20th century._3_

According to the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, by 1989 the estimated number of Ukrainians and their descendants living outside of the political boundaries of Ukraine was 14,464,000. Most of them were inhabitants of neighboring countries (Russia, Moldova, Belarus, Poland, etc.), but a significant number - about 2.5 million - dwelled in the Americas and close to 1.5 million others were residing in the non-Russian parts of Soviet Asia, especially in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The estimated number of Ukrainians in Western Europe - less than 100,000 - was small by comparison;_4_ that community, in less than two decades, is now a number of times larger.

"Every fifth able-bodied Ukrainian," declared Nina Karpachova, the ombudsman for Ukraine, in a speech in the Ukrainian Parliament in 2003 on the matter of rights of Ukrainians abroad, "is working abroad at present." There were approximately 1 million Ukrainians working in Russia alone in 2002, according to an estimate of the Ukrainian Embassy in Moscow. According to Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, other countries receiving illegal and legal Ukrainian immigrants included the following:

Poland: 300,000
Italy: 200,000
Czech Republic: 100,000-200,000
Portugal: 140,000-150,000
Spain: 100,000
Turkey: 35,000
United States: 20,000

Statistics on emigration-related matters also are maintained by the Ukrainian Ministry of Labor and Social Policy, which indicate that in the first half of 2002 Ukrainians were engaged in temporary employment in the following countries, too:

Greece: 7,249
Cyprus: 2,914
Liberia: 2,266
United Kingdom: 1,287
United Arab Emirates: 703
Germany: 551

However, the figures provided by the Ukrainian Ministry of Labor and Social Policy, according to Ms. Karpachova, do "not reflect the real situation with labor migration from Ukraine." She suggests that "at least 5 million Ukrainian citizens work abroad every year depending on the season."_5_

In May 2005, Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs Valentyn Nalyvaichenko offered the following figures and explanations: from 1 million to 1.2 million Ukrainians work in Russia "at the time the work force is in high demand there"; from 220,000 to 230,000 work in Portugal, "of [whom], 200,000 have legal employment"; and from 120,000 to 130,000 work in Spain, "50,000 on [a] legal basis." Last year, he added, "around 50,000 Ukrainians received five-year multi-entry visas to the United States."

He added that the total number of Ukrainians working abroad could be as many as 5 million, but considered other estimates presented during the time of the presidential elections of 2004 to be too high. "Most of the people considered to be Ukrainian nationals living in Australia," he said by way of example, "were in fact ethnic Ukrainians with Australian passports."_6_

Countries that lie under the Southern Cross have not been totally overlooked by this most recent wave of Ukrainian emigrants. Thousands of Ukrainians, mostly on temporary resident visas, have been moving to Argentina. According to the Argentine National Direction of Migrations (Dirrección Nacional de Migraciones), in the period 1990-2000 a total of 9,879 permits for temporary residence and another 587 for permanent residence in Argentina were granted to Ukrainian nationals._7_ Although not an insignificant number, Argentina, a country that in 1870-1950 received millions of immigrants from overseas and neighboring countries, had expressed a willingness in the early 1990s to admit hundreds of thousands of settlers from Eastern Europe. Canada's Globe and Mail reported on April 17, 1992: "In a bid to forge stronger ties with the European Community, which is having difficulty in absorbing migrants from the collapsing economies of the former Soviet blocs, [Argentine President] Mr. Menem has offered to accept as many as 300,000 refugees from such countries as Russia, Yugoslavia and Ukraine." However, the Globe and Mail pointed out that there was a catch: Argentina would accept the immigrants, but the plan was that "Europe [would] not only supply the bodies" but in addition would "have to supply Argentina with up to $20,000 (U.S.) for each immigrant." The response of the EC to the idea was described as "lukewarm," and the scheme never materialized.

Notwithstanding this, the more than 10,000 Ukrainians who entered Argentina during the 1990s represented for the era a noteworthy influx. "The Ukrainian community is one of the few immigrant communities here which is not slowly dying out," wrote Michael Soltys in the Buenos Aires Herald in September 1998, adding "in the last three years some 4,000 Ukrainians have entered the country with work permits and the first arrivals are already being naturalized." Many more would come, he continued, "but they all have to pass the filter of the Argentine Consulate in Kyiv, which keeps the flow to a trickle."_8_

The flow seems to trickle less to Argentina's neighbor, Brazil, where the several-hundred-thousand-strong Ukrainian community traces it roots largely to the first wave of immigration at the turn of the 20th century, but, as the figures presented above show, a strong migratory movement has been directed to the former metropolis of Portugal.

In May this year Lisbon's Correio da Manha reported that in 2004 there were 66,000 legal Ukrainian immigrants in Portugal, which made them the second largest group after the 77,000 Brazilians in this category._9_ As far as illegal immigrants are concerned, immigrants' associations estimated that their in 2003 fell between 120,000 and 150,000, "the majority of them Ukrainians," reported journalist Mario de Quieroz.

To put these numbers in perspective, Mr. de Queiroz also noted that the total number of immigrants in Portugal, legal and illegal, was close to 600,000. That figure, he pointed out, "in relation to its total population," was "much higher than that of Italy and Spain," and among European Union countries, "only comparable with Germany, France and Luxembourg."_10_

For that country of 10 million, which traditionally loses more population to emigration than receives it through immigration, Ukrainians form a novel major immigrant community that is not Portuguese-speaking. A substantial proportion of the Ukrainian immigrants, regardless of their former occupations in Ukraine, are engaged as laborers in various construction projects across the country.

"We work 12 hours a day," one immigrant, described as a trained engineer, told Tobias Schultz, reporting in EuroViews. "It is a lot, but I don't have a family to go home to here, so I don't mind too much." The Portuguese government would be happy for many of these newcomers to stay, it seems, for it has steadily been legalizing their status in the country. "The people of Ukraine are popular in Portugal," Constanca Urbano de Sousa, a senior adviser on immigration at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, is quoted as saying. "They are very often highly skilled, they are more than properly motivated to work, they don't complain and they don't cause problems of any kind, besides they learn the language very fast."_11_

Meanwhile, the first signs of organized life can be discerned. Mr. de Quieroz reported that four periodicals catered to immigrants from Eastern Europe in Portugal: Slovo (40 pp.; press run of 16,000 copies), Bereg, Imigrante and Maiak Portugalii. All four are published in Russian. "Because the Russian language was the only one that readers had in common," Vitalii Serebriakov, described as the director of Slovo, explained to Mr. de Quieroz, "We should satisfy the interests of all." It was added that the language also was "easily accessible to Serbs, Montenegrins, Bulgarians and Macedonians."_12_

An article titled "Immigrants Request an Agreement between Ukraine and Portugal" that was published in 2003 by the High Commission for Immigration and Ethnic Minorities (Alto Comissariado para a Imigraçao Minorias Etnicas) mentioned two groups associated with the appeal: the Sobor Association of Ukrainian Immigrants (Associaçao dos Imigrantes Ucranianos Sobor) and the Bereg Social Movement for Enlightenment and Information (Movimento Social para o Esclarecimento e Informaçao Bereg)._13_

The signs of organized life extend also to spiritual care. In January Bartholomew I, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, appointed Ukrainian-born Ilariion Rudnyk the auxiliary bishop to Archbishop Epiphanios, the Orthodox metropolitan of Portugal and Spain. The news was welcomed by Ukrainian Orthodox in South America.

Thus, on January 28, the eparch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in South America, Jeremiah of Aspendos, wrote to Patriarch Bartholomew to express his delight with the appointment and to offer any necessary assistance. "Our eparchy in South America celebrates the divine liturgy and the holy services in Ukrainian, Portuguese and Spanish," he told the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople, and "has a strong link with the Spanish and Portuguese culture." The eparchy based in Curitiba, Brazil, was, he said, "at your disposal to cooperate with the new bishop in everything we can."_14_

The Ukrainian Catholic Church also has a presence in Portugal, and there are indications that the Ukrainian community in Brazil has been lending a hand. According to a recent e-mail communication from Father Jaime Valus, there currently are two Ukrainian Catholic priests from Brazil serving in Portugal, Fathers D. Colecha and Mário Zavirski, both of whom are based in Lisbon.

In an article titled "A Mass of the Byzantine Rite," the newspaper Jornal O Catanheirense reported that on February 7, 2004, a service "directed at the Ukrainian community of our religion" in Castanheira de Pera (a small town about 80 kilometers from Coimbra) was celebrated by Father Josafat (Andrii) Koval. He was accompanied, the report continued, by Father Delmar Barreiros, described as the director of the Pastoral Service for Immigrants (Pastoral das Migraçaes) with whom the immigrants could discuss such matters as legalization of their status in Portugal and the "exercising of citizenship."_15_ The Ukrainian Catholic priest had been quoted the month before by the Correio da Manha in a story about a victim of an accident in Cantanhede, whose family could not raise the necessary funds to transfer his corpse to Ukraine; local inhabitants were pitching in._16_

In the other Iberian country, Spain, a bilateral agreement with Ukraine "on temporary migration of Ukrainian citizens to Spain for employment with the aim of simplifying employment procedures" has been planned for the near future._17_ It was estimated that the number of Ukrainians in the country was similar to that in Portugal, though Spain has nearly four times the population of its neighbor. The Embassy of Ukraine in Spain (homepage: http://www.embucrania.org.es/) lists 10 Ukrainian associations in that Iberian country.

In Greece, where "as a rule, Ukrainian citizens are engaged in the private sector as nurses of the elderly, domestics, and dancers in restaurants and cafes," the legalization process was facilitated by the enactment of a law on aliens in May 2001. The law stipulates "the granting of residence permits to those illegal migrants who resided on the territory of Greece not less than two years before the law came into effect." It had followed "meetings with ... Greek MPs as well as managers of relevant ministries and agencies [to discuss] the complex migration situation in the country ... in particular the lot of Ukrainian women migrants as potential victims in the sex industry."

Efforts to start a periodical in Ukrainian in Greece can be traced to 1998. "In January a group of Ukrainians in Athens began publishing a semimonthly newspaper in Ukrainian and Greek, the Visnyk, to serve the needs of the Ukrainian community," said a report on Ukrainians in Greece in The Ukrainian Weekly._18_

In Italy, where the Ukrainian "women mainly care for the elderly and children, work as office cleaners, domestics, in bars and the like" and "quite a few of the men are engaged in the private sector as well as on construction sites and in agriculture," the matter of rights of Ukrainians in the country has been the subject of ongoing discussion between the Ukrainian and Italian governments with one stumbling block reported along the way being the failure to sign "a treaty on readmission."_19_

Ukrainian Catholic clergy and seminarians have long been centered in Rome, and in May 2002 a reported 5,000 Ukrainians gathered in the capital city to attend a Ukrainian Catholic Easter divine liturgy that was celebrated by Bishop Ivan Choma and 10 other priests in the Church of St. Sophia. In addition, "Ukrainians in more than 40 other Italian cities were able to celebrate Easter in their own language and rite."_20_

A year later, in November 2003, representatives of 24 Ukrainian communities in Italy met to establish the Christian Society of Ukrainians in Italy and discuss problems of concern to immigrants._21_

The website http://www.geocities.com/ukrainskadiaspora/ lists Ukrainian organizations and press in a number of countries in Europe. The list includes the Ukrainian press in such well-established communities as the one in the United Kingdom, where the number of Ukrainian visitors in recent years has steadily been increasing. In that country, during the period of 2000 to the first half of 2002, "the U.K. Embassy in Ukraine informed that 8,825 persons visited ... for education, 40 for medical treatment, 963 for employment, and 8,627 for agricultural work."_22_

However, other estimates of this diverse group have run higher.

For example, Stepan Shakhno, described as "a Ukrainian student and chairman of the European Youth Parliament in west Ukraine" who spent several months in the summer of 2003 interviewing and gathering data on Ukrainians in the U.K. for a trade union congress report on their work conditions, told the Guardian newspaper that "estimates put the number of Ukrainians working in London as high as 40,000, with possibly up to 100,000 Ukrainians in the U.K. as a whole."_23_

The same newspaper again drew attention to conditions faced by Ukrainians by reporting the death of a Ukrainian porter who had been "secretly living in a tiny alcove behind rubbish skips" in the "sub-basement" of the Cafè Royal. More than a century after it had been built, "the rich and famous continue to flock" there "to eat, drink, dance and be merry," the newspaper said. "But it emerged yesterday [December 31, 2003]," it continued, "that while the likes of Sean Connery, Clint Eastwood and the newly knighted England rugby coach Clive Woodward were attending glittering functions, several floors beneath them a porter from the [sic] Ukraine was eking out a rather less glamorous existence and suffering a sad lonely death." As detectives were investigating how the 47-year-old Ukrainian had died, his death, the newspaper said, "put the spotlight on the employees who inhabit a shadowy world behind the scenes in upmarket restaurants and hotels."_24_

It is clear from the foregoing discussion and the statistics presented that Western Europe has been emerging as an important site of contemporary Ukrainian immigration. The region as a whole is second only to Russia, which Ukrainian government officials, as noted, have said is the foremost destination for citizens who work abroad. In 2002 the All-Russian census counted 2,943,471 Ukrainians in the Russian Federation - fewer than the last Soviet census of 1989 had reported (4.4 million). Yet that country receives the most Ukrainian visitors. Ms. Karpachova has noted that more Ukrainians visited Russia in 2002 than any other country - 6.1 million compared with 4.2 million for Poland._25_

Further afield, it remains to be seen how many Ukrainians will stay in the countries of Western Europe they now inhabit and how many will return or perhaps move on to other countries across the Atlantic Ocean. However, a trend that has emerged is that as Ukraine's own population declines, the Ukrainian diaspora, whether in communities such as the one in the United Kingdom or in the southern hemisphere in Argentina, has steadily been enlarging. Ultimately, the figure of 7 million Ukrainian citizens living abroad is a highly questionable one, but it is less disputable that the number, temporarily or permanently, outside the country runs not in the hundreds of thousands but in the millions. Ukraine may not be a member of the EU, but many of its citizens, it could be said, are already there, living and working in any number of its member-states.

1. "Kuchma Signs Watered-down Law on Ukrainians Abroad," The Ukrainian Weekly, April 18, 2004. [Back to Text]

2. "Foreign Affairs Ministry Initiating Creation of Single Migration Organ," Ukrainian News Agency, May 24, 2005 (http://www.ukranews.com). [Back to Text]

3. See V. Kubijovyc and V. Markus, "Emigration" in Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 1, ed. Volodymyr Kubijovyc (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), which notes that in the 20 years before World War I 2 million Ukrainians from eastern Ukraine moved to Asia, while about another half a million from western Ukraine left for overseas destinations in the same period. [Back to Text]

4. See V. Kubijovyc et al., "Ukrainians," in Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 5, ed. Danylo Husar Struk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 460. [Back to Text]

5. "Every Fifth Able-Bodied Ukrainian Is Working Abroad at Present," Interfax Ukrainian News, April 2, 2003. [Back to Text]

6. "Five Million Ukrainians Worked Abroad in Year 2004," Ukrainian News Agency, May 24, 2005. [Back to Text]

7. See Ezequiel Texidó, "El Acuerdo Bilateral Celebrado entre Argentina y Ucrania," in Eduardo Geronimi, Lorenzo Cachón, and Ezequiel Texidó, "Acuerdos Bilaterales de Migración de Mano de Obra: Estudios de Casos" (Geneva: Sector de la Protección Social, Programa de Migraciones Internacionales, Oficina Internacional de Trabajo, 2004), 135. [Back to Text]

8. Michael Soltys, "A Different Kind of Multinational: Ukrainian Immigrants to Argentina," at http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/3hweb/ukraine.htm. [Back to Text]

9. Correio da Manha, May 5, 2005. [Back to Text]

10. Mario de Queiroz, "Las Múltiples Voces de la Inmigración. Periodismo en Portugal," at http://www.aulaintercultural.org/article.php3?id_article=158. [Back to Text]

11. Tobias Schultz, "Welcome to Portugal - Especially if You are Ukrainian" at http://manila.djh.dk/portugal/. [Back to Text]

12. Mario de Queiroz, "Las Múltiples Voces de la Inmigración." [Back to Text]

13. See "Imigrantes Pedem Acordo entre Ucrânia e Portugal" at http://www.acime.gov.pt/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=243. In the course of research for this article, it has not been possible to obtain hard data for any of the countries concerning the age, occupations, male-female ratio, religious affiliation or ethnicity of the immigrants from Ukraine. [Back to Text]

14. "Mensagens de Dom Jeremias/Ferens/Bispo de Aspendos" at http://www.ecclesia.com.br/eparquia/mensagens_pastorais/mensagens_d_jeremias.htm. [Back to Text]

15. Jornal O Catanheirense, February 29, 2004. [Back to Text]

16. "Solidariedade - Peditório em Cantanhede: População Ajuda família Imigrante," Correio da Manha January 27, 2004. Henadii Rohovets, the consul of Ukraine in Portugal, is quoted there as stating that "25 percent of the deceased immigrants (147 in 2003) are not transferred to their country of origin." [Back to Text]

17. Ukrainian News Service, May 24, 2005. [Back to Text]

18. The Rev. Ken Nowakowski, "Ukrainian Liturgy Celebrated in Greece," The Ukrainian Weekly, July 12, 1998. [Back to Text]

19. See "Status of Observance of Ukrainian Migrant Workers' Rights in the Receiving Countries" at http://www.ombudsman.kiev.ua/S_Report1/gl2_5.htm. [Back to Text]

20. See "Ukrainians in Italy Celebrate Easter," at http://www.ucef.org/news/020517.html. [Back to Text]

21. See "Ukrainians in Italy Establish Christian Society, Discuss Immigrant Problems," at http://www.risu.org.ua/eng/news/article;2473/. [Back to Text]

22. "Status of Observance of Ukrainian Migrant Workers' Rights in the Receiving Countries." [Back to Text]

23. "TUC Report Reveals Grim Exploitation of Ukrainians," The Guardian, March 9, 2004. [Back to Text]

24. "Behind the Golden Doors, the Sad and Lonely Death of a Porter Trapped in a Life of Squalor." The Guardian, January 1, 2004. Newcomers from Ukraine in England are featured in the fiction novel by Marina Lewycka, "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian: A Novel" (Penguin/Viking), which made the shortlist for the 2005 Orange Prize and won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction. For an excellent review of the book by Myroslav Shkandrij, see "Wheels within Wheels: A Family is Turned Upside Down by the Arrival of a Femme Fatale from the Old Country," The Financial Times, March 12, 2005. [Back to Text]

25. "Every Fifth Able-Bodied Ukrainian is Working Abroad at Present." [Back to Text]

Serge Cipko, Ph.D., teaches as an assistant adjunct professor in the department of history and classics, University of Alberta, and is the author of a forthcoming book on Ukrainians in Argentina to be published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press.

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