Stranded or shunned: Europe's migrant workers caught in no-man's land
For tens of thousands of workers around Europe, #stayathome has posed a painful quandary. The continent’s migrant workers face an unenviable choice: stay at work, often on the social care frontline, and potentially risk infection, or return to their home country jobless and stigmatised.
Many people from Europe’s poorest regions, who took advantage of freedom of movement, are now caught in a no-man’s land, with border closures, no repatriation flights if they’ve lost their low-paid jobs, few savings, and limited or no access to a state safety net by virtue of anomalous social security provisions. If they do manage to return home, some face the suspicion that they have brought the virus with them.
“With great sadness, I urge Romanians in the diaspora: do not come home for the Easter holidays,” the Romanian president, Klaus Iohannis, told the 5 million Romanians living abroad. Christian Orthodox Easter falls on Sunday 19 April. Yet, until now, “the diaspora” have been lauded as a progressive political force and a source of much needed economic remittances.
Despite strict quarantine conditions to protect public health in Romania and Bulgaria, tens of thousands of workers from both countries are choosing to flock west to take up low-paid seasonal farm jobs. In Germany, employment provisions have been waived by the government to save the precious white asparagus crop: German food growers won’t need to make any social security contributions for the migrants as long as they are flown out again within 115 days.
Austria, meanwhile, defied border closures by organising charter flights from Romania and Bulgaria to bring in hundreds of 24-hour care workers to look after elderly and vulnerable people. On one flight, more than 200 people, mostly women, from the western Romanian city of Timișoara and the Bulgarian capital Sofia arrived in Vienna. According to some of those who travelled, they had no opportunity to socially distance during the journey and had their passports taken from them during the state-organised quarantine once they landed in Austria – until local media exposed the story.
Some 40,000 Romanians already work as 24-hour carers for elderly people in Austria on fortnightly and four-week alternating shifts. But they are on self-employed contracts and, as a result of the pandemic, face a precarious future. Romania banned internal travel and most air travel in and out of the country after the government declared a state of emergency on 16 March.
When the borders closed, many carers became stranded – some in the homes of their patients, others in Romania, where they have no income. Their employment arrangements require them to spend half the month in the home of their patient in Austria, and half in Romania. Earning less than €11,000 per year – the threshold above which a tax declaration to the Austrian revenue authorities becomes mandatory – carers mostly work via intermediate agencies and brokers.
Although they are EU citizens, many lack national insurance numbers or even bank accounts in Austria, so they do not qualify for help from the Austrian or Romanian state. “We feel abandoned by both states,” Marinel Dagadita, a carer and activist for carer rights, told the Guardian. Some people stranded in Austria who wanted to return home to their children said they had to take expensive taxis to get to the border, and then pass through border control on foot.
Misinformation, poor knowledge of the German language or the law in Austria and the power dynamics and isolation typical of round-the-clock care jobs, mean most of these women steer clear of trying to establish their rights.
“If they can organise flights for carers to go to work, why can’t they also help carers finishing their shifts go back home?” Elena Popa, who runs a group representing carers, asks. “They know how valuable we are to them. We hope that this health crisis will help bring light on carers and do us justice.”
Popa wants better regulation of the sector and more robust employment contracts. Her colleague, Gianina Culda, who has been looking after a patient with severe dementia since February with no break and no chance of returning to see her own daughter, is less optimistic. “Politicians see us merely as work instruments, soldiers in the frontlines, but with no ‘weapons’, no rights, and only obligations,” she says.
Igor Dodon, the president of Moldova, one of the poorest countries in Europe, 1 million of whose 3.8 million citizens work abroad and send remittances home that constitute one-fifth of GDP, asked Moldovans abroad “to stay where you are” during the pandemic.
The government even insisted that Moldovans would be allowed to fly home only if they bought €200 worth of medical insurance before boarding a plane. Following an outcry, that decision was deemed illegal by the constitutional court.
Four thousand Moldovans who have lost their jobs because of the pandemic have returned home in the last two weeks. Thousands more, many with children in the country, are still waiting for permission.
“Is this what I’ve worked for all my life?” Natalia Boldescu, a cleaner in Rome, asked in tears. After 15 years of work in Italy, Boldescu lost her job at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak. She has diabetes and other health conditions, and is desperate to return to Moldova, to her husband and two sons. She registered on a diaspora repatriation list provided by Moldova’s Ministry of External Affairs a month ago. She also registered on a second private list but has not heard from either.
Whether the mass return of the eastern European diaspora to their homelands is temporary or for good is hard to tell. With poorer medical and social welfare systems, eastern European countries are likely to suffer severe economic and social crises, the Sofia-based Open Society programme director, Marin Lessenski, has warned.
Bulgaria, which has about 900,000 people living in other European countries, saw more than 100,000 people return home in the 10 days from 13 to 23 March.
The crisis for undocumented migrants and asylum seekers working in Europe’s sizeable shadow economy is complicated by a varying patchwork of responses to the pandemic. Up to a million undocumented people are thought to be at risk of destitution in the UK alone.
Some countries have acted pragmatically to separate health from legal status. Portugal has offered temporary citizenship to those seeking asylum; Spain has loosened its regime of immigration detention; Germany suspended the use of the Dublin regulation – the law that determines which EU state is responsible for examining an application for asylum; Ireland has said it will respect a firewall for any undocumented people seeking healthcare or social services during the pandemic: they will not be reported to immigration or the police. Forced deportations are also down.
But Greece, Belgium, the Netherlands, Cyprus and Slovenia have temporarily suspended access to asylum, and Hungary has cancelled the right to asylum altogether because of “risk related to the spread of Covid-19”.
The contagious nature of Covid-19 creates a public health paradox: if migrant workers, undocumented or otherwise, are unable to seek medical help or social assistance when sick, they will continue working, putting the wider community’s health at risk. “You want people to receive the right healthcare to remain healthy, and keep the whole population healthy,” said University of Birmingham sociologist Jenny Phillimore, who specialises in migration and public health.
As the EU attempts to establish a common approach to lockdown exit and the economic consequences of the pandemic, it is now also being urged to advocate for a common approach towards migrants.
“There’s no justification for limiting the right to asylum,” Catherine Wollard, director of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles said. Having a large number of people in legally, economically and psychologically precarious situations involving detention or destitution exacerbates public health concerns, she added.