[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Poor Transcarpathia

[rfmcdonald]

In a recent post at Demography Matters, Edward Hugh explores Ukraine's demographic prospects. In almost every area, Ukraine compares unfavourably with Russia: Of the two countries, Ukraine possesses the higher death rate, the lower birth rate, the higher proportion of HIV seropositives, and five million emigrants drawn from a population of fifty million before independence in 1991. Olena Malynovska's January 2006 essay at Migration Information, "Caught Between East and West, Ukraine Struggles with Its Migration Policy", provides a good overview of the migratory component of Ukraine's demographic transformation, so intimately predicated as it is upon the collapse of the Soviet-era economy and Soviet-era population flows (from Ukraine to the Asian frontier, to Ukraine from Russia) and the development of new movements and economic gradients (Ukrainians to southern Europe and Poland).

The recent no-racism.net essay "Go West ... Labour and Transit Migration from and via Transcarpatia, Ukraine" examines the manifestations of migration in one province-level territorial unit of Ukraine, Zakarpattia Oblast, bordering directly on the new European Union member-states of Slovakia and Ukraine. The reasons for the new drift of Ukrainians west turn out to be quite visible.

The discrepancies cannot be missed: Visible signs of massive poverty exist even in the eastern regions of Hungary, yet behind the border crossing the situation is even worse. The state of most of the houses and the clothes people wear lead one to guess that the average income often does not exceed 70, sometimes 120 and seldomly 150 Euros. And that presumably only for those who have managed to secure work at the (as yet?) meagre Maquiladora (3): At the Skoda/VW factory directly behind the border at Chop or at the Japanese-US car supplier Yazaki, a few kilometres further towards Ushgorod. These workbench extensions are branches of the car industry that has extended to Eastern Europe (4) over the last years.

Here in Transcarpatia, not far behind the EU border, a few global players hope for a long-term low wage paradise, where without a doubt the following saying applies: "It's terrible to be exploited by a transnational corporation, but it's (often) worse not to be".

This is because people in this region have few alternatives: back when the Soviet Union still existed there was already little industry, the agricultural possibilities are limited by the Carpathians and tourism is as yet not well developed. Many have no other choice but to eke out a living with small trading opportunities or petrol smuggling (5). Or, they can emigrate: to the Czech Republic or to Russia, to Portugal or the USA (6), be it as seasonal labourers, as au-pairs for a few months, as construction workers or as domestic helpers for a few years. And many don't come back at all, at best for a visit on important family holidays.

The Ukrainians are in a difficult situation, no-racism.net confirms, but they're at least better off than the non-Ukrainians who, trying to make it to the European Union, are either caught by border police and put in no-man's-land detention camps or who misjudge the winter climate and get found by springtime. As increasingly close as EU-Ukrainian relations seem to be, it doesn't seem very likely that egress across this or any other part of their common frontier will become easier. Not only Hungary, but Slovakia will be joining the Schengen area, and as Dominic Swire at Transitions Online ("The EU's Thin Line") described in his now premium-content article, these two countries' participation in a passport-free travel zone will necessarily mean a crackdown.

Because a significant percentage of the world’s migrants either come from or pass through Ukraine, mostly to Slovakia, this border, nestled in the arch-shaped Carpathian mountain range that stretches from Slovakia through Ukraine and into Romania, will become the last passport check for the thousands of illegals who choose this route into Europe.

The International Organization for Migration estimates that Ukraine is home to the world’s fourth-largest number of migrants, at 6.8 million. Few are there to stay, said Natalia Leshchenko from economic forecasters Global Insight.

"Large numbers of migrants come on transit from eastern and Central Asia and the Caucasus on the way to Western Europe, and especially the UK. Ukraine is on the transit route for illegal migration, and so most people do not stay unless they cannot leave."

These restrictions on movement across this region are historically unprecedented. The territory of Zakarpattia Oblast was part of the Kingdom of Hungary until 1918 (Carpathian Ruthenia) and then a restive province of Czechoslovakia until 1945. Zakarpattia is the homeland of a marginal Eastern Slav population known as the Ruthenes or the Rusyns, defined in part by their extra-Ukrainian ties, closely affiliated with central Europe and recognized as a national minority only in Communist Yugoslavia. Zakarpattia has even been a land marked by mass emigration for well over a century: Hundreds of thousands of people of Rusyn descent live outside of of Zakarpattia that is now home to only one million people. The irony of exclusion of Zakarpattia's exclusion from Europe is as certain as it is confirmed.