“I am not a migration expert, but I took part in a project at Georgetown University focused on migration issues. Together with specialists, including from the UN system, we studied situations in different regions of the world. The overall conclusion is this: in situations similar to Ukraine’s, when the middle class leaves due to a military conflict — people who are able to leave and adapt to a new environment — at the point of departure 80–90% declare that they intend to return, but afterwards 80% do not. This is the general averaged statistic across different cases,” Kyrylo Hovorun said.
He added that he observes a similar pattern among his students in Stockholm, who come from the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Eritrea) and Syria. They are representatives of the middle class, educated, and around 80% of them also said when leaving that they would return home — yet they remain in Sweden, the director of the Huffington Institute noted.
Therefore, he considers the projection that one third of Ukrainians who left after the full-scale invasion may return to be “absolutely optimistic”.
At the same time, he emphasised that migration — despite being highly politicised today — is a global and normal phenomenon, a modus vivendi i operandi (a way of existence and action) of humanity.
“Throughout most of its history, humanity has always migrated and moved. It is actually an anomaly when people stay in one place — this needs to be clearly understood,” said the Doctor of Philosophy. “We are talking about the period when the first hominids left Africa two million years ago and began spreading across the world. This process has never stopped since. So it is entirely normal. The question is who is the object and who is the subject of this process.”
To illustrate his point, Kyrylo Hovorun gave the example of Samoa.
“Samoa is an archipelago that was once the cradle of Polynesian civilisation. From Samoa, people travelled thousands of kilometres by canoe to Hawaii and reached New Zealand. It was probably one of the largest migration processes in human history, when thousands of kilometres were covered by canoes carrying people from Samoa around 3,000 years ago.
Today, Samoa is divided into two parts — Western and American. People from Western Samoa aspire to reach American Samoa and from there move on to Hawaii or elsewhere. Because access to American Samoa is difficult, they go to New Zealand. As a result, what used to be the periphery of the Polynesian world — Hawaii and New Zealand — has become the centre of new migration processes, while the former centre is shifting to the periphery. In other words, everything has reversed. Samoa has lost the ability to remain a subject of migration processes and has become merely their object,” Hovorun explained.
Russia, meanwhile, has done the opposite by using the ideology of the “Russian world” to shift from being an object to becoming a subject of migration processes, he added.
“Russian world” is, first and foremost, a migration project. It was conceived by methodologists at Moscow State University (Shchedrovitsky and his followers), when after the collapse of the Soviet Union a large number of Russians moved across the world, forming a powerful periphery connected to the centre.
From the outset, these thinkers decided to treat this periphery as a resource — to draw on its know-how, skills, including adaptive capacities, and the education people gained abroad, in order to support the centre, Moscow. That was the original idea of the ‘Russian world’.
Then, in the early 2000s, this idea shifted in the opposite direction — from a centrifugal to a centripetal model. Instead of the periphery supplying knowledge and skills to the centre, Moscow began sending out messages and signals to mobilise that periphery. In this way, the periphery was mobilised and weaponised, and this migration process was put at the service of Moscow,” Hovorun explained.
Relying on this resource — the weaponisation of migration processes — Russia, he argues, went on to launch its war after becoming a subject of these processes. Ukrainians, who had been part of these dynamics since Soviet times by supplying resources, were used by Russia and are now being turned against Ukraine, the director of the Huffington Institute in Los Angeles stressed.
“Now the question is for us: are we ready to be merely an object of migration processes, or are we capable of becoming their subject? Will we become like Samoa, simply supplying resources to its former colonies? Or are we capable of being subjects?” Kyrylo Hovorun emphasised. He noted that immigration to Ukraine is “not a question of if, but of when.”
“It will happen, it is already happening. And it will happen in any case. What do we need to do about it? We need to be prepared for it. Clearly, we must avoid the weaponisation of these processes, but this time internally — by politicians and populists who will exploit this issue. In other words, we must avoid becoming Hungary under Orbán in terms of immigration.
To prevent this, we must avoid the mistakes others have made. We need to be very selective and establish clear criteria at the gates that will regulate this migration,” the Doctor of Philosophy said.
One such criterion, in his view, could be the adaptability of incoming people and their willingness to leave their “ghetto” — because those who are not ready will create one here.
One of the key solutions to the complex challenges of immigration, Hovorun believes, is education. At the very least, he emphasised, Ukraine needs to understand the people who will arrive.
“Let’s take Bangladesh (as one of the potential countries for attracting labour migrants. - Ed.). I have been to Bangladesh. I taught at the best university in Dhaka — it is an excellent university. It is a very complex society and also a very educated one. The first Nobel Prize winner — Rabindranath Tagore — came from Bengal; he was not Indian. He is, in a sense, Bangladesh’s Taras Shevchenko, though we know very little about him. We do not know Bangladesh. And yet we talk about Bangladeshis coming here to mix cement…
Yes, some of them will indeed be cement workers. And to integrate them into our society, we need to create the right conditions. Because they will either integrate or not, but they will still be here. And these conditions of integration can be created through education,” Kyrylo Hovorun said.
“I think we should pay attention to an institution that is not universities or schools — in Scandinavia it is called folkhögskole (folk high school). These are colleges where there are no grades, and which are mainly used to integrate migrants into local society. The motivation is not grades, but other tools of integration. I have seen this in the Swedish context — it works very well,” Hovorun concluded.