Ukraine nevertheless stands apart. It is still a nation at war, yet in a survey last year, 55 percent of residents named mass emigration as the greatest threat to their country—the UN estimates that Ukraine could lose nearly a fifth of its population by 2050. And whereas politicians in Eastern Europe typically invoke demographic decline as a justification for conservative policies such as restricting abortion rights and providing financial bonuses for large families, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has vowed to reverse brain drain by improving his country’s economy and rule of law. In December, he announced a program to draw young Ukrainians back from abroad with promises of preferential loans to start their own businesses upon their return. [...]
Why young Ukrainians leave places like this is no mystery. The country is Europe’s second-poorest, beset by corruption and low living standards, and it shares a border with the European Union. Furthermore, a war with Russia-backed separatists still wages in the east, and has displaced 2 million people, many internally. (Ukraine’s depopulation problem is also tied to high mortality rates: According to Ella Libanova, the director of the Ptoukha Institute for Demography and Social Studies at the National Academy of Sciences, 30 percent of 20-year-old Ukrainian men won’t make it to their 60th birthday, thanks in large part to alcohol abuse and road accidents.)
So Ukraine’s limited ability to stem emigration is not entirely an issue of political will. Rather, it is a consequence of the country’s place in the global economy: as a reservoir of migrant labor. In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, the majority of first-time EU residence permits were given to Ukrainians, the lion’s share of whom moved to neighboring Poland. Remittances from overseas made up more than 11 percent of Ukraine’s GDP. That Ukrainians are heading to Poland and elsewhere in Central Europe also highlights the absurdity of these countries’ negative rhetoric toward prospective immigrants: “One of the paradoxes of [Central European] anti-migrant rhetoric toward the south … is that it’s only possible because those countries have benefited heavily from migration from the east,” Alexander Clarkson, a European-studies lecturer at King’s College London, told me.
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