Abstract
The book concludes with the chapter that focuses on the unique paired comparison of two opposing life strategies—dynamic, risk-taking and future-oriented ‘achievement life strategy’ and conservative, risk-minimising and survival-oriented ‘survival life strategy’. The chapter summarises how the innovative conceptual life strategy model, presented in this book, has enabled the research into lives of people experiencing crisis, their migration experiences, attitudes and perceptions of their problematic sending home and their new receiving country. This chapter discusses the empirical validation of the conceptual framework and presents the two critical frameworks of personal-structural ties that empirically proves the assumption that life strategies of survival guide those migrants leaving their country at its peak crisis points. It does so by providing systemic comparative analysis across the 16 data points. The chapter then necessarily moves to extend the discussion around the limitations of the life strategy conceptual framework and future research. The chapter concludes with the discussion around the main trends and ideas that follow from this book.
This book offered unique insights and discussed findings that shed light on the current understanding of the process of constructing life strategies through migration, using the case of post-independence Ukrainian migration to Australia (1991–2016). The insights presented in the previous chapters can be divided into two categories as per their impact areas—practical and theoretical.
The practical finding is that post-independence, Ukrainian migration to Australia has significantly changed over the years following the collapse of the Soviet regime in the early 1990s. The post-independence Ukrainian migration wave (1991–2016) itself has undergone shifts and changes in its character linked to the turbulent political, economic and social regime transitions. Contextual, structural and individual differences played a role in shaping the different life strategies adopted by the migrants, which created and shaped the different migration experiences. These experiences fall into two opposite categories of ‘survival life strategy’ and ‘achievement life strategy’. More precisely, the book argues that there are systemic differences in the way life strategies were shaped before migration, enacted during the actual act of migration, and changed after migration, depending on the period in which Ukrainians began to leave post-independence Ukraine and arrive in Australia.
It was found that after 2004, the character of Ukrainian migration to Australia has changed. Based on qualitative interview data, complemented by secondary data analysis, the two distinct periods of Ukrainian post-independence migration emerged, and two cohorts of migrants were identified: (1) ‘survival migrants’ (1991–2003) and (2) ‘achievement migrants’ (2004–2016). These two migration periods were found to correspond to the two types of life strategy—survival life strategy and achievement life strategy. The complexity of each participant’s individual life strategy and their experiences of the post-Soviet transition while in Ukraine and during their migration, arose because of the interplay of individual factors, such as the micro-components of life strategy—values, aims, needs and sense of agency. It was also due to a set of Ukraine/Australia-specific structural macro-factors that emerged from the economic, political and demographic constraints in post-independence Ukraine, as well as the shifts in Australia’s migration policy from the 1990s.
In making sense of these varying contexts, the types of life strategies and the way participants enacted them were far from static, being instead dynamic in the spatial and temporal sense. Life strategies shifted and changed as individual circumstances and environments evolved, and the length of stay in Australia increased. Importantly, it was found that migrants over time have become more integrated and contributed more to Australian social and economic life, while at the same time becoming less active in the Ukrainian community. In the light of the research findings, the cohort of 2004–2016 migrants who had implemented achievement life strategies were found to be more successful migrants in terms of their integration and professional and social self-realisation in Australia compared to the cohort of 1991–2003 arrivals. On the other hand, the 1991–2003 arrivals who implemented survival life strategies, formed a cohort that needed assistance and support from the Australian Government to help them better integrate and contribute to Australian society. The differences in the life strategies of the informants was found to be determined not only by the set of individual characteristics, framed as values, needs, aims and agency, but also by such structural characteristics as class, age and the place of origin.
1 Two Life Strategy Profiles
The empirical fieldwork revealed rich qualitative data that was used to investigate the life strategies of migrants from crisis/transitional regime and their bifurcation into two different life strategies of achievement and survival.
The main argument of this book is that there are two types of life strategies that are typical for migrants from crisis regime, and which vary depending on the migration period. In 2004, for the first time in the overall history of Ukrainian migration to Australia (including that prior to World War I and the waves of post–World War II migrations), the number of skilled arrivals outnumbered those who arrived using the family reunion and humanitarian stream.
The comparison between achievement and survival migrants implementing corresponding strategies is presented in the Fig. 8.1.
A number of interesting conclusions are drawn regarding the allocation of migrants into these two types of life strategies—survival and achievement.
Firstly, the content and focus of migrants’ life strategies on the one hand depended on the personal set of micro-components of the life strategy as well as structural factors associated with their social background, and on the other hand, on the structural economic and social conditions of a migrant’s life before and after migration. For the ‘survival migrants’ who arrived in Australia during 1991–2003, analysis of their occupational and class characteristics as well as professional, identity and emotional shifts after migration suggested they created a set of personal and social characteristics which reflected a survival life strategy. This survival-oriented strategy was found to be made up of a combination of the following sets of characteristics: (1) aim to escape poverty and starvation, and regain job status; (2) material values, values of traditionalism, family well-being and comfort and conformity; (3) need for security (order and stability, living in a safe environment, avoiding threats), environmental needs (healthy environment) and social needs (integrity of social and individual values) and (4) weak agency. These characteristics were shaped in Ukraine before departure and they are what defines and reinforces the survival life strategy in the post-migration stages. As mentioned earlier, those in the survival migrants group were not very young (the average age of those in the group is 50 years), they are from the blue-collar class and they came from Western Ukrainian rural regions and small towns. These factors also affected the formation of life strategy of survival after immigration into Australia. Further, it is worth mentioning that the ‘survival migrants’ choices are dominated by migration push factors.
Humanitarian and family migration streams were found to be the pathways that ‘survival migrants’ used to implement their life strategy of survival. The blue-collar workers and suppressed entrepreneurs formed a particular group of humanitarian ‘survival migrants’ comprised of regular and irregular short-term arrivals who tended to obtain their permanent residency in Australia by claiming asylum. Depending on how their strategies were realised, the ‘survival migrants’ were identified as using ‘conspiracy’ and ‘manoeuvring’ tactics to enable their permanent migration. These tactics emerged out of explicit social networks and proved effective. Social networks were crucial for the group of short-term arrivals as they assisted them in managing the different types of precarity associated with a lack of life and work predictability and security, while they tried to get a visa to Australia and find ways to stay permanently. This precarity affected their financial or psychological welfare.
Another popular way that the interviewed ‘survival migrants’ implemented their life strategy was through the family reunion migration stream. An economic rationale, in the form of a plan to escape from poverty and unemployment in Ukraine, was the main driving force behind the participants’ choice of family reunion. A connection to family and dependency on the resources that the family provided was found in many cases to encourage dependency on the Australian welfare system. It also tended to create a type of comfort zone that favoured the continuation of survival life patterns after migration. Hence, the use of a survival life strategy was found to be somewhat stable for this group from their time in the sending country and then in the receiving country.
Their lives were marked by forms of stagnation. The emotional storehouse of the survival migrants was ‘poisoned’ in a sense by the social conditions arising from post-Soviet unrest. This directly affected the ‘survival migrants’ and resulted in the dominance of negative emotions after migration. The majority of ‘survival migrants’ showed emotions, such as disappointment, guilt, nostalgic depression and homesickness, caused by their separation from home and those they left behind. These emotions were an obstacle to the success of their integration into and adaptation to Australia. The ‘survival migrants’ become carriers of a virus of melancholy and stagnation, sometimes without even knowing it.
Influenced by occupational insecurity and structural disempowerment, a typical occupational experience found in the stories of the ‘survival migrants’ was an occupational downgrade alongside an economic upgrade. The dead-end careers as the occupational experiences of the majority of the interviewed ‘survival migrants’ proved to be shaped by structurally forced employment in non-professional jobs (dead-end careers) which was associated with the absence of occupational mobility in the new, changed environment. The survival life strategy for those ‘survival migrants’ who were skilled migrants and originated from white-collar working class families and cultural and scientific intelligentsia (who are minority among the interviewed migrants) was reflected in their experience of a sharp downgrade of professional and social status after migration.
The cohort of ‘survival migrants’ demonstrated a low level of English proficiency and a strong national identification with Ukraine, which is argued to have created barriers for successful social adaptation and integration into Australian society. As the most powerful and important motivation to work, material orientation facilitated their quick economic adaptation to life in Australia. This cohort tended to start their employment in the first available job, typically a manual job in construction, as painters, or teaching Ukrainian at the Ukrainian school in Lidcombe. Material values guided their behaviours and consumption practices. Being born into blue-collar working-class families and having secondary education, the majority of the interviewed ‘survival migrants’ do not attach much importance to professional growth and self-development. They considered that they needed jobs to bring in an income. However, all of them mentioned that back in Ukraine, they would never have believed that they would have had to wake up at 4 am and work as hard as they did in the construction industry, as the majority of them did, with only short breaks for holidays. Furthermore, the future plans for the ‘survival migrants’ tended to be retrospectively oriented towards their past life in Ukraine. It was found common for them to plan to return to Ukraine for their retirement and to invest their earnings in Ukrainian real-estate and land.
In the light of the interview data gathered from ‘achievement migrants’, it appears that this cohort was shaped by an intrinsic achievement-oriented life strategy compared to the ‘survival migrants’ survival orientation. Twenty of the 25 participants implemented their achievement life strategies through migration and continued their achievement life strategies after migration: they catered for interesting work and professional growth and self-realisation, wanted to earn better money and to improve their living conditions and quality of life. The social and economic structural conditions they faced in Ukraine and their varied responses to micro-components meant that the ‘achievement migrants’ focused on different types of achievement. The field data suggests that there are two subtypes of achievement life strategies: the first type being the strategy to achieve success (professional, family or cultural), and the second type being the life strategy to achieve self-realisation.
About two-thirds of the ‘achievement migrants’ implemented the first achievement subtype and were noted to have significant socially oriented needs for cultural understanding and professional recognition. This cohort of ‘achievement migrants’ implementing their strategies to achieve success (professional, family or cultural), steered their lives and pursued migration to achieve large-scale external aims oriented towards opening up new opportunities for extended recreation of socioeconomic status. They valued the opportunity to apply their knowledge and skills in their professional field and had a strong sense of agency focused on improving Australia and the people around them.
Furthermore, the subtype trying to achieve success (professional, family or cultural) is characterised by an active life position, a focus on high performance, and the ability to live and work in conditions of uncertainty and risk associated with migration and career mobility. They valued originality and having access to a variety of choices of cultural styles and ways to implement them. They had a strong orientation towards external recognition and sought the approval of others. Their choice of strategy to achieve success was found to be preconditioned by an aspiration for growth in terms of technical expertise and self-realisation in work, and a desire to develop professional and social skills. The young IT-skilled migrants who made up this group and who had had few opportunities to develop professionally chose to be “globally engaged” through migration, and use this strategy to achieve their aims of better pay, professional development and future alternative employment opportunities.
For about one-third of participants, the second subtype of achievement life strategy (achieving self-realisation) applied. The second subtype targeted creative change and emphasised the importance of an individual-oriented set of needs for professional and family self-realisation, and the need for creative self-expression in a safe environment with economic, social and political stability. This strategy was found in the stories of the marriage migrants. Their life strategies were characterised by a conscious and practical orientation focused on creative personal change, and personal self-improvement and self-development. As the participants’ stories demonstrated, the implementation of the strategy to achieve self-realisation depended on self-awareness and the success of integration, a factor not usually associated with career growth, but with self-realisation in career. For those informants following this subtype of achievement life strategy, the achievements and successes, which lead to a better chance of obtaining a higher occupational position, are not as important as striving to realise their improve their skills and grow professionally that prevail over the desire to ensure career prospects.
Both subtypes of achievement life strategies are characterised by successful adaptation and social and professional integration, an Australian and/or cosmopolitan national identity, a high level of English proficiency, subjective satisfaction with migration and an idealised vision of their life after migration, future plans to succeed in terms of professional self-realisation, career growth and personal development. Second, the formation and implementation of the life strategies of ‘survival’ and ‘achievement’ Ukrainian migrants were found not to be gender specific. However, the ways the ‘divident migrants’ arrived in Australia to implement their achievement life strategies reflect gender-specific migration streams. Men tended to arrive through the male-dominated skilled stream, women participants through the female-dominated family migration streams (predominantly marriage).
Third, a desire to have a better life and a sense of agency are not sufficient to shape life strategies. As has been demonstrated social or structural characteristics such as class, age and place of origin had an impact on the formation of the two different life strategies in the two cohorts of the interviewed Ukrainians in Australia. The cohort of ‘achievement migrants’ implementing achievement life strategies was dominated by migrants under the age of 32 from the class of professionals and cultural and scientific intelligentsia originating from Eastern and Central Ukrainian big cities, who had plans to implement career and family plans in Australia and overseas. By comparison, the cohort of ‘survival migrants’, whose average age at the time of the interview was 50 and migrated on average in their forties, originated predominantly from the class of blue-collar workers and suppressed entrepreneurs from Western Ukrainian regional areas and small towns, and aimed to escape economic hardship with the help of migration and plan a future return to Ukraine for retirement.
2 Life Strategy Model: Research Limitations and Future Research
In theoretical terms, this book presents a valid contribution to the field of migration, European and Asia-Pacific studies as it offers a new conceptual research framework (which is developed and empirically tested) to study life strategies of migrants across time and space—three stages—before, during and after migration The theoretical originality of this book is two-fold—first, the manner in which it brings out the interplay between Eastern European and Western (Western European and North American) approaches to regime transition, and second, as noted earlier, the re-conceptualisation of the idea that life strategy is a part of the modified life strategy research framework to study lives of migrants. Using a two-fold methodological approach, empirical data to be tested by the modified life strategy research framework were collected. The key data were the qualitative data gathered from 56 Ukrainian migrants in Australia (NSW). This empirical work is experimental, and the conceptual model needs further testing and validation on an extended dataset and on other groups of migrants in Australia and worldwide.
It should be emphasised that the main limitation of this study is the timeframe for data collection, which only investigated the arrival of post-independence migrants into Australia up until 2016. Since 2016, the aftermath of ‘Euromaidan Protests’ and the accelerated military conflict in East Ukraine have slightly changed the dynamics of Ukrainian migration into Australia and impacted the socioeconomic development of Ukraine. Along with this would come changes to the life strategies of migrants. Thus, the conclusions provided earlier may not precisely account for the experiences of arrivals since 2016. Further, taking into account the scope of the study and the number of respondents, the data should not be regarded as exhaustive or definitive.
Reflecting on the possible research limitations coming from my Ukrainian background and my insider research status, I would conclude that there were more benefits than drawbacks. As a qualitative researcher, I was not separate from the study, even though I had limited contact with my participants. I suggest, my Ukrainian background has helped me in the research process, and I believe was essential to it. It helped in recruitment and in understanding and talking to those participants whose English was not excellent. This was especially important in terms of the discussion of personal topics and being able to understand the participants when they went into the detail of their lives. The stories of participants were immediate and real to me; their individual voices were not lost in a pool of numbers and unfamiliar words.
As a sociologist I have developed the habit of always engaging in self-reflection and analysing my conclusions with the aim to avoid bias, I continued to do so in this research project where I was working with my own national community. Furthermore, my insider status can be counted as relative when talking to participants from blue-collar working class or suppressed entrepreneurs and the class of cultural and scientific intelligentsia. My social-class affiliation was different to the majority of the participants and therefore, their lives were unfamiliar, which makes me an outsider in relation to their life experiences. Furthermore, my young age meant that some of the experiences of older participants were unfamiliar, which I reflected on again to avoid bias. However, I acknowledge that any qualitative researcher cannot retreat to a distant or objective ‘researcher’ role. Just as our personality affects the analysis, so, the analysis affects our personality.
Finally, I would note that the participants constructed continuous causalities about their changing life circumstances as they faced an array of new challenges in Australia. They simultaneously had to deal with the realities of life in Ukraine which reached them through contacts with friends and relatives who had stayed in Ukraine. The research has shown that migration situations and life pathways are dynamic and tend to change as the result of changes in social circumstances for each individual person as well as structural factors in the sending and receiving country. In any further studies, it would seem appropriate to widen the field of analysis by interviewing larger numbers of Ukrainian post-independence migrants in Australia about their experiences and how they coped with challenges in the receiving and sending countries. This would enable the further testing and verification of the life strategy research framework developed in this book and extend knowledge of the formation of different life strategies before migration and the transformations of these strategies after migration. Thus, the dominance of the different life strategies in the two different migration periods could be further refined.
Further, studies could be widened to include migrant family members (spouses, children and other relatives) and to assess the application of the life strategy analysis to other ethnic groups of migrants in Sydney. This would be important as a way of determining what might be useful integration mechanisms for migrant groups who arrive as ‘survivors’. This book has shown that the group of Ukrainian ‘survival migrants’ deprived themselves of access to the social and economic benefits that are supposed to accrue to all Australian citizens. Understanding why this was the case needs more extensive sociological investigation. Extending this research to a range of nationalities or experiences could potentially contribute to further theoretical developments in the area of life strategies and migration, as well as help to practically improve migration policy in Australia and other countries.
3 Concluding Remarks
The analysis discussed in this book indicates the following range of main trends and hypotheses:
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1.
There is link between the type of life strategy and the regime crisis peaks. The decrease in the number of migrants implementing a survival life strategy among Ukrainians in Australia after 2004 implies that up until 2016, Ukraine was starting to recover from the post-Soviet economic, political and social crisis of the first decade of independence and as a result, survival mechanisms are no longer relevant for social actors. The change suggests that survival conditions in Ukraine changed for the better, at least before the escalation of military conflict in Ukraine following 2016, creating preconditions that enabled migrants to focus more on achievement. It also suggests that until 2016 life in Ukraine was improving and people were no longer forced to go abroad solely for employment in order to survive in the truest sense of the word. From this, it follows that the incidence of a particular life strategy in the country (Ukraine) is determined by the level of socio-economic, political and cultural development of the society. In the light of the empirical findings and looking through the prism of migration and migrants’ individual experiences, it is possible to talk about the sending society and argue that a particular type of life strategy was shaped by the type of production, the quality of life, the existence of legal regulation of economic and social life, the degree of participation of Ukrainian citizens in state governance, and the influence of traditions and beliefs.
The evolution in life strategies traced in the participants’ narratives supports the optimistic hypothesis that Ukrainian society until the escalation of military conflict in and around Ukraine since 2016 was shifting away from the so-called marginal and transition conditions. It was typical in the transitional situation that social actors found themselves in circumstances of uncertainty and crisis. It was found that in the transition societies, survival life strategies are prevalent. The survival life strategies admit such conditions as the low level of production and service sectors, deeper economic crisis, lack of democratic traditions, and authoritarian forms of government. Similar scholarship suggests that achievement life strategies are typical for individualistic societies characterised by free markets and pluralism. The interrelation between the incidence of survival or achievement life strategies of migrants and development back in their sending country, needs to be further tested and developed.
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2.
Migration from post-independence Ukraine is becoming less risky for host state. The evolution in the type of life strategy that dominated across the 1991–2016 Ukrainian migrations, from survival into achievement, implies a second hypothesis which suggests Ukrainian migration to Australia is becoming less ‘risky’ for Australia in terms of a growth in illegal migration and tourist-visa overstaying. Ukrainians no longer need to be opportunists, but instead create legal opportunities for themselves and contribute to the development of Australian society with their skills and experience. The risk of irregular Ukrainian migration into Australia was found to be low, which means Ukrainians should be seen as a ‘gain’ for the Australian labour market and cultural diversity. Ukrainian migration was found to have evolved from the short-term arrival of blue-collar workers and entrepreneurs who tried to permanently stay in Australia by using regular and irregular ways, into the arrival of well-educated IT professionals from Ukraine and ‘elite marriage migrants’ who created a brain-gain in Australia. The positive post-Soviet institutional dynamics in Ukraine since 2004, which affected migration patterns, were found to fundamentally change the ways individuals earned their living, planned their future and considered social and economic investments in terms of dividends. In the light of this finding, it can be suggested that there is a positive trend in the growing value of Ukrainian migrants in Australia. This argument should be further tested on a larger sample.
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Migrants implementing survival life strategies are less integrated into the host society and demand more support from the government. The cohort of the interviewed ‘survival migrants’ was found to be the least integrated cohort of Ukrainian migrants in Australia. Further research on the life strategies of migrants from a range of different ethnic groups needs to be conducted in order to identify what other groups of migrants are implementing survival life strategies in Australia. The Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection should target this cohort of ‘survivors’ and develop support programmes to better integrate these members of society, as they are the ones whose English proficiency is low and whose inclusion in primary groups is high. They are more likely to be dependent on the Australian welfare system and to need assistance with integration into the Australian labour market. This type of research on the life strategies of migrants across different ethnic groups in Australia and worldwide would benefit the cohesion and better integration of the members of multicultural societies.
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Oleinikova, O. (2020). Achievers Versus Survivors: Dynamics and Trends. In: Life Strategies of Migrants from Crisis Regimes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39839-2_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39839-2_8
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