‘The EU members in Central and Eastern Europe receive almost no immigrants’ would be the conclusion made by a casual reader of the press over the past two decades, but judging by the persistent silence on the issue by the region’s politicians, this conclusion would seem logical, writes Vít Novotný.

Vít Novotný is a senior research officer at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies

This would be reinforced by Hungary’s obstinate anti-immigration rhetoric and the tough stance that the Baltic states and Poland have taken on accepting asylum applications from people arriving at their borders from Belarus.

Except that it would be completely wrong. In reality, the 11 countries in the region receive per capita legal immigration inflows that are evenly scattered across the EU. When measured by the total number of newcomers over the past decade, Poland and Czechia rank among the EU’s immigration champions, placed fifth and seventh respectively for total inflows between 2013 and 2022. Drawing on a recent Martens Centre study and discounting short-term permits for periods of less than 12 months, Poland registered 1.5 million legal arrivals during that time. Czechia registered 0.9 million.

Notwithstanding the public image, Hungary is an average EU member in terms of the annual inflows of non-EU immigrants per head of population. In the 2023 per capita count of newly admitted persons, Hungary slipped down to nineteenth place on the EU table but is still ahead of Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Italy and France.

So why is this skewed perception of Central and Eastern Europe as the home of immigration reactionists? Because local politicians want you to think they are not ‘naive’ about immigration. Receiving newcomers from outside the EU would not fit the image of the far-sighted Central (and East) Europeans who, unlike the allegedly deluded politicians in the ‘old Europe’, are attuned to the dangers of immigration. Because many observers, inside and outside the region, take the politicians at face value.

If pundits checked publicly available statistics, they would notice remarkable phenomena that are at odds with the official rhetoric, or the lack of it.

Since 2022, the Central and Eastern European member states have become home to nearly half of the Ukrainian war refugees that the EU currently hosts.

Separately, for several years before the full-scale Russian assault on its eastern neighbour, Poland was, by a wide margin, the EU’s leading recipient of temporary labour from outside the bloc. Plus, all the countries in the region have been importing labour from Asia and the Eastern European countries that are not part of the EU.

As a result, one increasingly encounters Ukrainians who have taken jobs in a wide variety of fields, ranging from banking and medicine to cleaning. There are also Indian waiters in Romania, Filipino hotel staff in Croatia and Belarusian IT engineers in the Baltic states. Vietnamese immigration in the region goes back decades.

Apart from the war in Ukraine, this new immigration to the region is driven by labour demand spurred by economic growth, population ageing and numerous job vacancies due to the emigration of the native workforce. The flows are largely independent of the party-political compositions of the respective national governments.

On average, the legal status of legal non-EU immigrants in Central and Eastern European member states is different from those residing in the rest of the EU. Apart from hosting disproportionally high ratios of Ukrainians under temporary protection, the countries in the region tend to admit non-EU immigrants based on their readiness to work. This contrasts with Western and Northern Europe, where family reunification and asylum are the main categories.

Whatever the formal status of the immigrants, public discourse tends to simply ignore their presence. This is despite advocacy by pro-migrant NGOs. By avoiding immigration in their public positioning and sometimes even denying its existence, the political classes in Central and Eastern Europe are hoping to create the illusion that they fully control immigration and protect the ethnic status quo. A strong element of fear of political opponents exploiting the issue also comes into play.

By maintaining, however, a conspiracy of silence on immigration, local elites are committing the same political mistake that their Western counterparts have been making well into the first decade of this century: denying that today’s open economies need foreign labour, and that immigration inevitably changes societies.

Indeed, the number of migrants is still generally larger in the countries that joined the EU between the 1950s and 1990s than in those that joined the bloc in the 2000s and 2010s. It is also true that Central and Eastern European member states have side-stepped most of the problems with the integration of immigrants that Western Europe has experienced since the 1970s.

However, the taboo over immigration prevents public discussion on the merits of immigration and its different types. Should problems come, and they may, Central and Eastern Europeans will be unprepared for the challenge. Perhaps now is the right time to open public debate on the issue.

Source: Euractiv.com