REFUGEES MUST KEEP ALL OPTIONS OPEN Professor Paweł Kaczmarczyk, director of the Center for Migration Research, University of Warsaw, talks to Witold Żygulski.
I
n recent weeks we have been dealing with an unprecedented migration wave in Central and Eastern Europe, which started after the Russian invasion of Ukraine; how does it differ from the one from a few years ago in the southern part of Europe, when refugees from North Africa were trying to get in? There is, of course, one thing in common: we are dealing with a massive influx of people who are, directly or indirectly, victims of warfare. But that is where the similarities end. The first fundamental difference is the temporal framework. The influx of refugees from North Africa, first to Turkey and then to the countries of southern Europe, was a process spread over months or even years. Now, however, we are dealing with an extremely rapid process. In Poland alone,
8
Spring 2022
more than 2.2 million refugees have arrived in a month, while the total number of people who have fled Ukraine already exceeds 4 million. Another difference is that the current movement of people threatened by war into the European Union is happening extremely easily. Even before the Russian invasion, Ukrainian citizens were able to enter Poland freely under very liberal regulations. The Polish labor market was wide open to them. The EU also launched protection procedures that allowed Ukrainian citizens not only to enter its territory, but also to move freely between member states, without activating the refugee status application process, which is formally complicated and takes a very long time. The third and most striking difference is the demographic structure of the current wave of refugees. Data from the registration of Ukrainian citizens in the Polish PESEL system, with a total of over 800,000 applications as of the beginning of April, shows that 49.5 percent of them are children, while among adults 44.5 percent are women. The share of men and elderly people does not exceed a single-digit number. This is because men have stayed to fight the Russian invaders, and even those who would have liked to leave have been unable to do so due to exit restrictions imposed by the authorities in Kiev. During the 2015 migration wave, the opposite was true. At the time, we were frightened by images of numerous groups of young men from North Africa and a few other countries such as Afghanistan making their way into Europe, but research and analysis shows that this was primarily an offshoot of cultural conditioning and the migration strategies of men trying to be the first to get to Europe, hoping to someday bring their families over. All the data from refugee camps at the time suggests that the demographic structure of that migration was radically different from that of today. The Warsaw Voice
