RAGUE, Czech Republic � The changes are small but
plain to see: the stray African face on the subway, Ukrainians who clean
and build, vegetable markets run not by Czechs but by Vietnamese who offer
something truly foreign here � a plastic shopping bag free of charge.
These are the first signs of what many experts say may become yet
another uncomfortable transformation in Eastern Europe: immigration.
Soon some of the nations of Eastern Europe may become magnets for
immigration � legal and illegal � in a marked shift for societies closed
off for 40 years under Communism and, for nearly a century before, much
more likely to export cheap labor than to let it in.
The immediate lure is the expansion of the European Union on May 1,
which will slowly break down the borders of its 10 new member countries,
among them the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia.
But most of these countries also face the same kind of demographic
crisis as their European Union counterparts in the West � populations that
are both aging and declining as people have fewer babies.
The crisis, to some extent, can be offset by immigration, though there
is little agreement here that that should happen. Even in places like
Germany such a solution has not been uniformly welcomed and accepting
foreigners from poorer nations has become an uneasy norm.
But once the borders of the eastern states begin to meld with the new
Europe and living standards rise, as is eventually expected, there may be
no keeping back eager immigrants. Domestic consensus on the issue may not
matter.
"They will come, no matter how, and no matter how strong the measures
against them will be," said Anna Grusova, director of the Counseling
Center for Refugees, which aids asylum seekers here.
Greater immigration may make Eastern European nations look still more
like their counterparts in the west, adding in some ways to the vague but
growing sense of a pan-European identity.
But experts and many immigrants themselves here say the change may come
especially hard in Eastern Europe. Unemployment and barriers to migration
are high and experience with foreigners � obliterated for the most part
during the long, deep freeze of post-World War II Communism � is still
very low.
"It is not possible," Atanda Muri Sanni, a 46-year-old Nigerian who
immigrated in 1991, said when asked if his adoptive country would draw
many more immigrants.
He said he was grateful to the nation that gave him asylum and educated
his four children. But, he said, he has never felt anything more than an
outsider, looked down on for his skin color and recently told by the
police, after his mobile phone was stolen, that they could not help him
because he was not a Czech citizen.
"The Czech mentality is a difficult mentality," he said at his grocery
store in Usti nad Labem, in northern Bohemia. "They do not understand that
the world is one."
Still, the Czech Republic, with a higher percentage of immigrants than
any of the other former Communist states seeking entry to the union, is
the only country in the region with an active, if rancorous, debate about
attracting immigrants.
Other nations have hardly touched the issue, though the International
Organization for Migration recently identified several as increasingly
attractive destinations, including the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia
and Poland; other experts include Hungary. All of these nations have very
low immigrant populations � 2 percent in the Czech Republic and less than
1 percent in the other nations � and have tightened laws on illegal
immigrants as part of joining the European Union.
"Just take the examples of Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland," said
Jean-Christophe Dumont, an economist at the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development, an international body that provides policy
advice to governments. "Nobody would have thought maybe 15 years ago that
these countries would become net immigration countries so fast."
Among the new eastern members, the Czech Republic � a nation with deep
veins of both tolerance and xenophobia � may be providing the first
glimpse of any future debate on immigration. There are Ukrainian steel
workers in the old industrial city of Kladno; Slovak doctors and nurses;
Vietnamese hawking cheap clothes in markets. Yugoslavs who once ran small
souvenir shops in Prague have moved to more permanent stores.
Now there are some 230,000 legal immigrants here, roughly double the
number in Hungary. Illegal immigrants may add 200,000 or more.
With nearly 11 percent unemployment, immigrants take jobs most Czechs
do not want, like cleaning, construction and restaurant work. There has
been little violence.
There seems, at the moment, an attitude of benign neglect: there are
not enough immigrants here for much of a reaction or for the government to
focus on integrating them into society. For now, in fact, the nation's top
leaders are moving in divergent directions.
For the center-left government of Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla, it is
a story of numbers. The Czech birthrate is among the lowest in Europe, and
recently released figures project a sharp population decline.
In 2003, the population was 10.2 million. With restrictive immigration
policies, the number of Czechs is expected to drop to 8.1 million by 2050.
And, like the rest of the European Union, Czechs will be old � far older
than Americans.
Last year the Czech Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs initiated a
pilot program, the first of its kind in the region, and still small, to
attract young and skilled foreigners from three countries, Bulgaria,
Croatia and Kazakhstan.
"We are quite serious about using migration to alleviate the negative
impacts of demographic aging," said Michal Meduna, the top immigration
official in the ministry.
But Vaclav Klaus, the contrarian center-right president, has questioned
the cost of immigration, suggesting that the Czech Republic has the right
to refuse immigrants to preserve its national character.
"Is this xenophobia?" he asked at a debate last year. "Or rather the
respect for the rights of citizens to be what they are and what they would
like to be?"
There is broad agreement that Czechs are less worried about immigrants
from near-neighbors like Ukraine or Slovakia than Africans, Middle
Easterners or Roma, also known as Gypsies.
But Dusan Drbohlav, a social demographer at Charles University here,
noted that relying on immigration from nations like Ukraine and Slovakia
helped little with the problem of a shrinking population: they are not
having many babies either.
