Immigrated to Ukraine: First-hand articulations

Zalizniak & AssociatesImmigration

Ukraine acts as though it does not want you. They do little to promote tourism. They do absolutely nothing to promote immigration, even though a stream of pension payments from abroad would help the economy. They allow the rumor to persist that the country is as cold and forbidding as Russia. Actually, the summer weather is better than New York or Washington, and the winter no worse. Their lack of hospitality would lead you to believe they are hiding something valuable. They are. I moved here six years ago, started a second family, and am planning to stay.

Ukraine’s strong traditions have seen them through a millennium of hard times. They were under the thumb of the Mongols, the Tatars, the Ottomans, the Hungarians, the Austrians, the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Russians and the Germans. The net is that there aren’t any historically strong political institutions, but there are plenty of customs and traditions. They have a strong belief in God, a strong network of churches, and a strong belief in family. They also have a healthy dislike of outsiders telling them how to live.

A sociologist would say they have a high level of social capital. People here take care of each other. They give their seats to old people, mothers and babies on the Metro and buses. They take a great interest in children, almost an intrusive interest, making sure that parents do a good job of keeping them warm. They take a very active interest in the neighborhood, like in a small town. Everybody knows my business, and even as a foreigner I hear quite a bit about other people’s business. On the one hand it means I had better not be harboring any deep and dirty secrets, but on the other hand it means I am under the protective umbrella of a network of people who belong to a place and love that place.

The government ranks with the worst of Africa in terms of corruption and transparency. Ukrainians know better than to expect much from it, which means that they are quite self-reliant. They distrust government promises about salaries, pensions, public works projects -just about everything – so much that almost nothing shocks them. Still, it all seems to work after a fashion. If you know who to talk to, you can get things done. In many ways their system of informal payments is easier to negotiate than an honest but inept bureaucracy in the United States.

To wit: the police in Washington DC are maddeningly fond of milking the driving public for speeding fines. They will set up a radar trap in the one place along a stretch of road where it is safe to exceed the 35 mile per hour speed limit and merrily issue hundred dollar fines. They treat you with cold courtesy, knowing that they are robbing you. Bribing them would be out of the question: why should they risk their $100,000 a year pension, negotiated via wholesale corruption at the level of the public service union and the legislature, for a $50 bribe at the retail level? Conversely, in Ukraine, $10 in cash usually settles the matter, and the grateful and underpaid cop will politely thank and ask this foreigner to confirm that Ukrainian women are really the most beautiful in the world.

The most important thing which distinguishes Ukraine from every Western nation, and most nations of the world, is their continuing, traditional belief in family. People love children. Women want children; people want grandchildren. They spend time with them, encourage them, teach them. They teach them traditional values, what they learned from the church and their grandfathers. There is not a great difference between the generations in their views on working mothers, parental obligations, different sexual orientations, social justice or other such issues as have so radically changed the West. I will be able to raise my son in a community with values much closer to those of my own childhood in the 1950s than my own country today.

Every man with an email account has been spammed with come ons for sexy Russian and Ukrainian women. They are right about the beauty: just about every travel writer since the time of the Greeks has commented on it. On the other hand, the girls are not libertines. A man looking simply for a playboy lifestyle would be better off going to Brazil, Thailand or someplace else.

Ukraine’s deepest secret maybe it’s economy. It has a truly first world population, in terms of intelligence and education, locked by its abysmal politics into a Third World economy. Life here is cheap; A Big Mac is cheaper here than any place else in the world. Salaries are low. You can hire good quality labor for not much money.

Ukraine’s economy does not make it attractive to immigrants, and the bureaucracy does nothing to make it easy for them to stay. The result is that Ukraine has remained homogeneous. Nobody here but Slavs, and they like it like that. Whatever the effect on financial capital, it has worked remarkably well to preserve their social capital. There are no minority problems because there are no minorities speak of. I can walk through any neighborhood in Kyiv, a city of 4 million, at any hour of the day without worrying for my safety. Low levels of income have kept people from buying cars. Kyiv remains a compact city in which public transportation works well. The Metro, tram, suburban trains, city buses and jitney buses all cost about 25?. They may not be comfortable or new, but they run frequently and have a ridership of middle-class people. You are not likely to find yourself seated next to a bum stinking of urine or a pervert. In fact, Ukrainians are admirably direct in telling people when their public behavior is unacceptable.

When it comes to attracting a wife, just having a stable Western income puts you in the top couple of percentiles of eligible bachelors. Few single men who get posted in Ukraine on business remain that way. In Kyiv one meets a large number of foreigners with longtime marriages to women who are still stunning. Though I am one of a relative few who arrived as a retiree, I do not see why others could not succeed in finding marriage, family, and community as I have.

Many Americans live successfully in Ukraine without mastering the language, but needless to say life is easier if you can conduct business without a middleman. Which language depends on the city: for Kyiv and points East and South the choice would be Russian; in Lviv it would be Ukrainian. Language instruction is an expense, not a great one, which should certainly figure into the budget of anybody moving to Ukraine. When they speak a foreign language, it is usually English – but not that many do.

There is no established path to permanent residency in Ukraine. Almost every foreigner who has been in the country fewer than five years is in some state of limbo with regard to immigration. But I have yet to see anybody forced to leave! It takes a degree of faith, a circle of friends who can share personal experience and what they have read and heard, and a good and sympathetic lawyer. The costs are time traversing the bureaucracy, the expense for a lawyer, and the time and expense of leaving the country periodically. In my case these did not exceed $5,000 before I got permanent residency on the strength of my marriage.

Every country in the West seems to be teetering. Unemployment and debt are out of control. Central banks are printing money with abandon. People of European ancestry are an infertile, aging, dependent demographic under increasing pressure from younger immigrants with no respect for them or their traditions.

– Graham Seibert