Abstract
The main focus of this chapter is on the individual context or micro factors shaping the life strategies of migrants. Through the lens of people’s retrospective reflections and memory of their lives before migration, this chapter examines how ‘survival migrants’ and ‘achievement migrants’ narrated their responses to the regime changes in Ukraine and the effects it had on their aims, values, needs, agency and decision to migrate. Important part of the discussion evolves around why migrants from Ukraine chose Australia as opposed to the USA, Canada and Western European countries. The chapter illustrates how the narratives of reasons behind migration and analysis of the four key building life strategy elements (aims, values, needs and sense of agency) enables the mapping of the different responses to regime crisis/transitions in Ukraine across the two cohorts of ‘survival’ and ‘achievement’ migrants.
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- 1.
The phenomenon got its name from the entrepreneurs who emerged in the 1990s in the post-Soviet region, who transported goods (mostly clothing, housewares, appliances, etc.) from abroad and had dozens of shops in the markets, often wholesale. The goods were usually purchased in the large wholesale markets in the country where they were produced (mostly China, Poland, Turkey).
- 2.
This raises the question of whether traditionalism is an obstacle to the development and successful implementation of life strategy and, thus, the realisation of values. Is it tightly linked to conservatism and are particiants with traditional values fated at constant survival? These topics are worth deeper investigation, but are not the main concern of this thesis.
- 3.
The accident of 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, located in Ukraine about 20 km south of the border with Belarus, was at the time the most serious ever to have occurred in the nuclear industry. It caused the deaths of 30 power plant employees and firemen (including 28 with acute radiation syndrome) and brought about the evacuation of about 116,000 people from areas surrounding the reactor. A vast area of Ukraine was contaminated. To this day, the number of deaths resulting from the accident is unclear and the subject of considerable controversy. According to the 2006 report of the UN Chernobyl Forum’s Health Expert Group: “The actual number of deaths caused by this accident is unlikely ever to be precisely known”.
- 4.
The term internality is applied here and further defined by attribution theorists (Henslin 1967; Langer 1975; Langer and Roth 1975; Weisz 1980; Stipek and Weisz 1981) as the ability of individuals to influence external circumstances or events, reflected in their belief they can influence the outcome. Several studies (Abrams and Finesinger 1953; Averill 1968; Comer and Laird 1975) have found that those individuals who experience uncontrollable negative events prefer to blame themselves rather than chance factors and external forces.
- 5.
The “Ukrainian Society: Monitoring of Social Change” is an annual social project coordinated by the Institute of Sociology since 1992. It consists of survey with Ukrainian population with a sampling of about 1800 respondents (aged over 18), and representative for such parameters as gender , age, education, region and type of settlement. Center “Socis” conducts the fieldwork.
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Oleinikova, O. (2020). Why Migration? Individual Context of Survival and Achievement. In: Life Strategies of Migrants from Crisis Regimes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39839-2_4
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