Throughout my life first in the USSR and then in Ukraine, people around me were emigrating. The ones who emigrated were always, without an exception, very much above average in terms of income. Nobody ever emigrated from poverty.
These days, of course, there are crowds of Ukrainians and Russians trying to get shitty jobs all over EU. They are not coming from any serious poverty either but they are not immigrants anyway. These are not the people who have relinquished their Ukrainian passports forever at the border. These are people who are going back to Ukraine. And then away again. And then back. They are trying to raise their status through this sad imitation of the real mobility of transnational elites.
The ones who live in actual poverty in the FSU countries never go anywhere. They won’t go to a neighboring town, let alone to another country. Even the kind of mobility that is engaged in by seasonal workers who go to the EU or women who go to sell sexual services is accessible (not only financially but psychologically and cognitively) only to those who have a higher income and a higher educational status.
The real division these days is between those who can move around (or could if they needed to) and those who can’t. Everything else is an outdated category that has no real meaning any longer.
Clarissa's Blog 
“They are trying to raise their status through this sad imitation of the real mobility of transnational elites.”
It’s only sad if you admire transnational elites and/or think they are worth emulating. If you think of rootless cosmopolitans as valueless nihilists (or worse) then there’s nothing sad about temporary/commuting migrants. They’re making improvements to their lives and their countries (they’re taking baby steps but baby steps are the most important).
I definitely think more highly of a Polish woman who goes to Belgium to clean houses for six month shifts (and the Ukrainian woman who comes to Poland to do the same) than a Russian oligarch who transfers millions in blood money to the UK to keep it out of Putin’s paws.
But if fluidity is all about capital moving freely then it can’t actually make moral judgements on how the capital was obtained. In true fluidity, Roman Abramovich and Bill Gates are moral equivalents.
LikeLike