Welcoming Ukrainian refugees: “It will be a challenge for Belgium”
Refugees Ukraine
Concentrated children sitting on the ground color the cobblestones of the sidewalk with chalk. The upper half of the stone in blue, the other half in yellow. All around them a crowd of more than 500 people splits into several files. The one on the right is dedicated to adults, the one on the left to families with children, the one in the middle to families with very young children. We are in Brussels in front of the former Jules Bordet Institute which houses the Ukrainian registration center dedicated by the Foreigners Office to refugees. Volunteers from “Serve the City” distribute water, sandwiches, cups filled with tomato soup thickened with rice. About twenty policemen channel the crowd. Taxis arrive and disembark families, sometimes with infants. usually they are mothers. Sometimes an older man, a father, an uncle, accompany them: Ukrainians aged 18 to 60 have been mobilized. Information comes up in some stories.
In Poland and Germany, refugees would be encouraged to continue their journey to Brussels, which would have a good reputation in terms of reception. Who is the “on”? Impossible to know for sure. This does not seem to be the work of an official actor, more likely it is local volunteers. The conditions of registration organized by the federal power are however not miraculous. The officials inside the building are no doubt doing their best, but they are obviously too few. The files move very slowly. Even though the sun is shining, it is cold. Some women stand for hours holding their child in their arms. Couldn’t all this assistance have been housed in a heated building? The recent vaccination campaign has, however, brought out of the ground infrastructures capable of accommodating hundreds of people in corrected conditions. Palais 8 du Heysel should, however, open in addition to Bordet…
“The center registers the arrival of the refugee who benefits from temporary protection” explains Eric, a volunteer, who has acted as the spokesperson for the citizens who have come to help informally. “It opens at 9 a.m. and closes at 5 p.m.” Many, we are told, line up early in the morning, as early as 4 or 5 o’clock. “Fedasil offers people who could not be registered before 5:00 p.m. to be housed in emergency accommodation. No one sleeps outside”. However, the same evening, about thirty people lined up at night. Registration leads to obtaining temporary protection. This was decided unanimously by the 27 members of the European Union and will benefit Ukrainian nationals or residents with a long-term residence permit. This protection makes it possible to work, to access social assistance, the school system and medical care. Registration at the Bordet Center also allows refugees who have no accommodation solutions to be dispatched to one of the approximately 24,000 families who have declared themselves to their municipality as willing to welcome them.
A dispatching which is obviously perfectible: we do not ask a host family to make up its composition. This one can, therefore, be a single man. Women and children make up the vast majority of refugees. Between paranoia and naivety, there is a middle ground. Relying on the experience of the Citizen Support Platform for Refugees – which for nearly 7 years has managed, without any notable incident, the meeting of tens of thousands of residents with more than 7,000 host families – seems appropriate. But this reception scheme by families imagined by the Federal government has implications that are not neutral. Indeed, it is, for example, with the CPAS of the municipality of the host family that the refugee can apply for an integration income. It should be noted that the Flemish Minister-President Jan Jambon (N-VA) provided for a subsidy per place of reception that the Flemish towns and municipalities would be freed up for Ukrainian refugees. Note also that Theo Francken outbid in the generous. “A roof is not enough” did he let it be known “we have to think about psychological support for people traumatized by the war”. As an individual, it is natural to be more sensitive to the fate of those who are like us. The politician should try to extend this natural impulse to those who are different from us…
Authorities expect 200,000 refugees
“Figures from the Asylum and Migration Secretariat estimate the number of Ukrainian refugees who will be taken in by Belgium at 200,000” says Sotieta Ngo, director of CIRE, Coordination and Initiatives for Refugees and Foreigners. The number is staggering. Ten times larger than the 2015 wave of asylum seekers fleeing Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. “The 27 Europeans voted for temporary protection. And Belgium has chosen not to make its reception capacities known. Which are therefore, on paper, unlimited. It is very good. On hi. But, you have to be able to cope. It’s going to be a challenge”. Arrivals of Ukrainians fluctuate from day to day. Estimates range from 300 to 1,500 per day. But, we know that the days of big crowds are ahead of us.
“This is the first time that temporary protection has been activated, everyone – I’m thinking of Jan Jambon’s statement about proposing subsidies – is, therefore, in the process of groping to build their policy in this area. But the theoretical framework is as follows. The State organizes the reception, the first stage of which is registration at Bordet or Palais 8. Then, registration in a municipality leads to obtaining a document activating the work permit, the right to health , the right to education and, if necessary, social assistance. In principle, it is the Federal government that compensates for the expenses incurred by hosting with the municipalities. Social housing whose temporality is broken down into years will not initially benefit Ukrainians. What proportion will remain on the floor and come off the Social Integration Income (RIS)? There is no monitoring of the socio-professional profile of new arrivals. How many elderly people, how many in working order, how many are women with young children who will not be immediately available for the labor market? We don’t know. But there will be RIS: 10 or 15% of this population? In any case, this will cost the Federal Government, the Regions, the municipalities…”.
Polish plumber or Ukrainian engineer?
There is another direct social effect that will arise. “We imagine that most school-aged children – how many will there be? 120, 130,000? – no command of national languages. So they had to install a gateway-class DASPA device. But the DASPA is not integrated to respond to an unpredictable and massive situation during the year. It’s getting organized. I doubt that the schools have the financial means to be able to accommodate and organize a device whatever it is. We can expect the population of school age to increase very rapidly by a proportion of the order of 10%. Because if we welcome 200,000 people, they will be there within 12 months”. The world of education is likely to experience big repercussions…
“Among the Ukrainian refugees, we know that there are very qualified people who will not be faced with the vagaries of the equivalence of diplomas and who will be very quickly employable. Many will integrate very quickly. But some employers might be more fussy and ignore certain qualifications. To possibly hire a technician at the scales of an unqualified employee. It will depend on the attitude of the employer. What is to be feared is, in the medium term, a surplus of the precariousness of undocumented or undeclared workers due to the arrival of competition”. It is interesting to consult the UNESCO statistics on education.
According to these, the percentage of the population having followed higher education is higher in Ukraine than in Belgium… The “Polish plumber” of yesterday will perhaps be a “Ukrainian engineer” tomorrow… however expect a Ukrainianisation of Belgian society? ” I do not believe. The Italian, Turkish, Moroccan communities etc. of Belgium were built on labor migration. Here, it is a migration of asylum. And this migration of asylum, in this case, is a migration that the Ukrainian refugees want as short as possible. It is hoped that the war will end quickly. But if the war drags on for years, asylum migration could turn into labor migration…”.