World Bank urges aging Eastern Europe to take in immigrant workers

[one...two...tree 2,762]

AP

BRUSSELS, Belgium: Countries in eastern Europe will have to open up to new waves of immigrants to prevent their economies being hobbled by labor shortages caused by rapidly aging populations, a senior World Bank economist warned Wednesday.

After years of exporting workers westward, Poland, Ukraine, Bulgaria and the Baltic states must bring in labor from outside Europe to offset their demographic decline, or forget hopes of catching up with Western economies, said Pradeep Mitra, the World Bank's chief economist for Europe and Central Asia.

"There's no question that immigration will be needed to fill labor shortages," Mitra told reporters. "The trade off is: accept migration in a regulated way or don't be serious about converging with EU 15 living standards."

Mitra was referring to the 15 Western nations who made up the European Union before the entry of 12 other European nations since 2004.

Launching a World Bank report on the region's economy, Mitra said falling birth rates were expected to lead to Ukraine's population falling by a fifth by 2025. Bulgaria, Georgia, Belarus, Latvia, Russia and Lithuania are all expected to see population declines of more than 10 percent over the same period.

Millions of Eastern Europeans have left to work in Western Europe since the fall of communism and the EU's relaxing of border controls. Their homelands are already suffering labor shortages and Mitra said that even if they attract the emigrants back they will still have to consider new sources of labor.

But he acknowledged concerns that the influx of outsiders could stir racism and xenophobia in nations unused to living with large numbers of foreign residents.

An EU opinion poll released Wednesday showed Poles, Estonians and Lithuanians have some of the bloc's highest levels of tolerance to living alongside people of a different ethnic group. However, fears of a public backlash are holding governments back from seeking non-European migrants.

In Poland, efforts to counter a labor shortage have focused on persuading Polish workers to return form Western Europe and attracting workers from neighboring Ukraine and Belarus.

The Bulgarian government has been looking at attracting ethnic Bulgarians from countries such as Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine, Russia and Moldova. However, with salaries in those countries often higher than in Bulgaria, businessmen are exploring conditions for hiring Vietnamese construction workers.

In Russia, millions of immigrants have already moved in response to the energy-fueled economic boom and a shrinking pool of native workers, triggering a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment.

U.N. data show just 200,000 foreigners are registered as living in Ukraine, mostly from other former-Soviet nations. Experts warn that without action to address looming labor shortages, the country of 46 million will not be able to maintain its healthy economic growth, which topped 7 percent last year.

"There is not an organized policy to identify those gaps and to seek legal mechanism to fill those gaps," said Jeffrey Labovitz, head of the International Organization for Migration mission in Ukraine.

Ukraine has also seen a surge in attacks on foreigners. More than 90, mostly dark-skinned students or migrants, have been attacked, 13 of them fatally, in apparent hate crimes this year alone, police say.

Even if they open their frontiers to newcomers, Mitra said immigration alone will not solve the problems of Eastern European aging. Other measures including pension reforms, higher retirement ages and increased adult education are needed to ensure that the aging population does not become too great a burden.

___

Associated Press writers Maria Danilova in Kiev, Ukraine, Veselin Toshkov in Sofia, Bulgaria, Ryan Lucas in Warsaw, Poland, and Jim Heintz in Moscow contributed to this report.

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/07/02/...tern-Europe.php

[mawilson 2,133]

Good luck. Eastern Europeans are about as xenophobic and racist as they come.