UKC

The family from Ukraine whom we are sponsoring arrived with us yesterday, after a lot of waiting and frustration with the visa process!

The kids found the local play park very much to their liking and seem to have slotted in easily to their new home. 

After they went to bed (with absolutely no fuss, I hadn't even realised they had gone to bed!) the mum and I sat and looked at maps and running routes and the dad and my husband sat and shared notes (via Google translate!) on whisky 🙂 The mum has previously won the Ukrainian orienteering championships! 

I think this will work out fine for us all 😃

Excellent news but the time it has taken is completely taking the piss.

Hopefully now they can settle in and not have the worry about food and shelter for their kids. 

But in no way surprising. If there were some source of refugee where every single one was 25 year old, non-smoking, teetotal with a work addiction and a medical degree, this country would still be finding some way to cart them all off to a gulag in the Congo rather than let them enter our brilliant utopia which is sadly full and has no room for any more people.... It depresses me every time I hear about migration that the nation at large doesn't seem to realise that the one thing we desperately need more of are young, well-educated and qualified people (whose education and qualifications we get for free because some other country had to pay for it) with children to support our aging population.

Yes, good to hear about a success story. My sister had a similarly protracted time of getting a lady from Ukraine into the country, I think her MSP and MP both had to get involved to move the process on and in the end there was some kind of problem by which the journey had to be made overground (about 10 days) rather than a flight (about 3 hours).

Yep, it's utterly ludicrous!

For many the problem came that the free flights which were offered intially stopped being offered by the time most visas came through!

The family who are with us have their car, so took the ferry from Amsterdam to Newcastle. DFDS have been excellent. Very easy to book. Totally free for the car, cabin overnight and restaurant for dinner and breakfast! Absolutely worth singing their praises!

The local orienteering community have been super keen to welcome our lady too. I found a Scottish League competition in May and asked her if she fancied doing it. She did, so I signed her up. I explained on her form that her English is minimal so if there are questions they should ask me. Immediately people were super keen to help her, offering a year free membership and lifts to events etc. She is really looking forward to getting involved with it all 🙂

We have a Ukrainian oncologist and his family moved in across the road in an empty house  

That's fantastic, I know the village will be very welcoming and the family will have a good time.

However a niggling unease is that a country with terrible problems have now lost a talented clinician.

I fully understand people making decisions for their own safety and security - and I would do the same - but you have to feel a wretched pain for those left behind. 

I reckon the vast majority of refugees, probably in most wars, will be the better educated people. People with a better level of education can navigate all the different channels to get out better, have more useful contacts, have more coping strategies and have learnt new things already so are more able to cope with learning a new language/ style of living etc. 

I guess the hope is that these people earn money here and go back home whenever war is actually over with resources and new skills behind them to help rebuild a post war country. 

Whether that happens, who knows! But it's a nice theory!

At the end of the day, the situation is awful for all of them, and as you say, given their situation we would do the same if we could. 

My heart breaks for them all 

I applaud that you (and others) have done this, that your circumstances and feelings of social responsibility have let/made you go ahead.

But as a bonus, it looks like you are going to get faster; please keep your guest confined to orienteering events north of the border so that I don't have yet another person finishing ahead of me 😁

From our point of view, it was a no brainer. We had spare rooms. And when we were traveling previously in Ukraine, people hosted us (obviously in happier circumstances) without a second thought and with such generosity. We have a very open house policy generally, people feel they can drop in on us whenever and we like it that way. 

I will convince her that she is not eligible for English competitions, as she is living in a different country! 😜 

It is widely believed in this country that immigrants only come to live a life on benfits and will become a burden that true-born Brits will have to bear. Anyone who has studied A-level geography should know that the majority of migrants are motivated, hard working, well educated, above average intelligence, in good health,  in the prime of life and wanting nothing more than to be able to support themselves, live in a decent home in peace and even pay their taxes. If only we had a source of such people to hand!

Sadly, our gain is the loss suffered by their homelands. If people don’t like living in a country with a steady supply of immigrants they should try living in a country suffering steady emigration, as all the best people get up and leave and the population becomes more and more skewed towards the dependent cohorts of schoolchildren and retired people.

Not as simple. The value of human capital is relative to its environment. Migrant workers will often move to where they can maximise their own human capital, and that can benefit the originating country far more than if they stayed where they were, especially if there was no opportunity for that capital to be used effectively in the originating country in the first place.

It’s therefore very situation dependent, but the impact of remittance, skills and business connections transfers back from destination to origin country is huge.

Can you give me an example of a country which has suffered a decline as a result of immigration?

Not entirely sure why you are asking me that but no, none comes to mind, it’s obviously dependent on the type and cause of immigration but as we experienced it in the West broadly it’s been good or at worst neutral for the destination country.

My point was that it can also be good also for the origin country, we should not simplistically assume that the gains of the destination country always cause an equivalent loss in the origin country.

Australia?

How did you end up with that particular family? Is someone matching hosts or Ukrainians?

We connected through one of the Facebook groups. I definitely don't think it's a good system, but it worked for us. As a Russian speaker, it was much less intimidating for me and them than it would otherwise be I imagine it would be

I just wanted to say good for you, and good luck to you all in the coming months. I've no doubt there will be moments of challenge and frustration, but hopefully also moments of great reward and even happiness.