Would there be much more immigrants in Eastern Europe right now if it wasn't for Communism?

Might be more in the way of regional migration. Though that depends upon the various governments not having issues due to the Communists forcibly moving minorities to areas they would be part of the majority.
 
Had Eastern Europe avoided Communist rule (for instance, had World War II never happened, or had the Bolshevik Revolution never occurred in Russia), would there have been much more immigration into Eastern Europe during the 20th and 21st centuries and thus much more immigrants in Eastern Europe right now?

Basically, I am curious about this considering that the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Western Europe all have sizable immigrant populations right now whereas Eastern Europe generally doesn't (with the possible exception of Russia, but a lot of the "immigrants" in Russia's case are simply ethnic Slavs from other ex-USSR countries). Indeed, would having a capitalist economy throughout the entire 20th century have caused Eastern Europe to receive much more immigration than it did in our TL?

Also, on a related note, would Eastern Europeans have been (much) more tolerant and supportive of mass immigration right now if it wasn't for them living under Communist rule for half a century or more?
Firstly - Most of the migrants in Russia are Tajiks and Uzbeks (performing the same function as Mexicans in the US or Turks in Germany - a cheap labor force).
Secondly - None of the Eastern European states was a colonial power (except for Russia, but I wrote about it above). Their languages are not so raspostraneny, and the economy is weaker. Hostility toward migrants was more pronounced in connection with the strong economic decline in the 1990s, which accelerated the development of the reaction. (And given Trump's victory and the success of the Alternative for Germany, we are already living in the era of world Jacobite).
 

CaliGuy

Banned
Well that's because there is a large source of immigration a few kilometers to the south of Spain.

There is no large source of immigration anywhere near Poland.
Sweden got a lot of immigrants even though there is no large source of immigration anywhere near Sweden, though.
 
Why did this change over the last two decades?

One basic reason is that there has been comparatively very little Finnish immigration to Sweden since the 70s, due to the growing living standards in Finland. In the last three decades most immigration to Sweden has been caused by the arrival of refugees, for example from the former Yugoslavia and the Middle East. The Finnish immigration (which peaked in the 60s) was work-driven, this newer immigration has been much less so.
 
Might be more in the way of regional migration. Though that depends upon the various governments not having issues due to the Communists forcibly moving minorities to areas they would be part of the majority.
Again there was regional migration. Thousands and thousands Slovaks moved to Czech lands.
 
A point that is ignored I think is that without Communist travel restrictions a lot of the non-European immigrants in Western Europe would likely be replaced with Eastern Europeans. For example the largest immigrant group in Germany would most likely be Poles rather than Turks simply because of the distances involved and the relatively long tradition of Polish guest/seasonal workers in Germany.

I think this is more likely the evolution of emigration and immigration in Europe from some altered post-Great War era and no WW2 scenario. Most of the population movement will be between the countries in Europe, aside from former colonial empire's exchanges, and I look at the Ruhr Poles as the best example. An industrial Germany will take up any labor "shortages" from surrounding countries, especially Poles since it has a minority and there exist linkages, as the economies shift and investment moves the factory rather than the laborer, you see something like the USA and Mexico, we export the higher labor cost jobs and automate locally, so population stays in place unless we have demand for "cheap" labor in areas the natives are less interested in, exacerbated by a wealthier "welfare" state where we "natives" can afford not to take undesirable jobs. So as say a Germany shifts factories into East Europe the populace stops moving in and that nation in turn may attract immigrants from its neighbors. But this is not likely to be a boom.

Communism here is replaced by economic factors that may leave East Europe less desirable as a destination until quite late in the game. Without communism you might never see the immigration of for example Vietnamese or other distant peoples to Prague or Bucharest or East Berlin, but Germany might have a big Chinese population if it kept its links to China and war still happens to push Chinese to leave, as they did to Hong Kong post civil war, and so on. It might butterfly it totally as those forces are not certain. It may still have a Turk (here Ottoman) population but only the "elite" rather than labor, akin to how Gulf State citizens flock to London or Paris for second homes and university. In other words the populations will be both job driven and refugee driven, tied in part to historic connections, UK and France to their colonies, Germany to its allies, etc. For example the USA has a Vietnamese population due to the war, here they might go to France or the UK or whomever should they have bolstered France instead. On and on as the colonial empires retract.

Overall I think the non-European population of Europe looks smallish and diverse, a warped collection of high skill/education types and simple laborers, perhaps thinner in the middle, so a Doctor from one country and a Nanny from another, but less folks looking to integrate and settle. The European immigrants will be job seekers, as each East European country industrializes and goes into post-industrial change the diversity will be in big cities or industrial areas but I doubt a Poland has any real new minority, just some tens (or hundreds) of thousands of fellow Europeans and some tens (or less) thousands of everyone else. As others have said I think immigration will be less conducive to people seeking citizenship.
 
I know this is kinda changing the subject a bit but if in an ATL you had had an independent Welsh-Speaking Wales emerge at the same time as the Irish Free State, what kind of immigration you you get there, I wonder?
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
I know this is kinda changing the subject a bit but if in an ATL you had had an independent Welsh-Speaking Wales emerge at the same time as the Irish Free State, what kind of immigration you you get there, I wonder?
Would there even be enough Welsh speakers in Wales for Welsh to be the primary language? If so, immigration would be quite low because people just don't want to learn Welsh when they could just learn English instead and go to the UK.
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
So, how exactly is Japan much more advantaged than Eastern Europe in regards to this?



Actually, it shows on page 14 here that Poland will almost converge with Italy's GDP per capita level by 2050:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/zanran_storage/www2.goldmansachs.com/ContentPages/18582260.pdf

Thus, Polish convergence with France and Germany by 2100 doesn't sound too implausible in our TL.

Anyway, maybe countries such as Poland would have still been poorer than France and Germany right now in a TL without Communist rule, but I doubt that Poland would have been much poorer than Italy without Communist rule.
Italy is going backwards in GDP. BACKWARDS. France and Germany are not.
 
Would there even be enough Welsh speakers in Wales for Welsh to be the primary language? If so, immigration would be quite low because people just don't want to learn Welsh when they could just learn English instead and go to the UK.

I am not sure about that.

If Wales is mostly Welsh-speaking, and is an independent state, it would be roughly comparable to OTL Slovenia and Lithuania. Those two countries have recently been significant net destinations for immigrants, Lithuania's Russophone community and Slovenia's non-Slovene Yugoslav populations coming from post-1945 migration. That Lithuanian and Slovene are minor languages in the European context was significantly less important than the attractiveness of the two countries to immigrants.

Much depends on the language dynamics of this alt-Wales. If the immigrants in Wales gravitate towards the Anglophone minority, for instance, I suppose that there could be some potential issues. But who says that Wales' immigrants have to be Anglophones?
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
I am not sure about that.

If Wales is mostly Welsh-speaking, and is an independent state, it would be roughly comparable to OTL Slovenia and Lithuania. Those two countries have recently been significant net destinations for immigrants, Lithuania's Russophone community and Slovenia's non-Slovene Yugoslav populations coming from post-1945 migration. That Lithuanian and Slovene are minor languages in the European context was significantly less important than the attractiveness of the two countries to immigrants.

Much depends on the language dynamics of this alt-Wales. If the immigrants in Wales gravitate towards the Anglophone minority, for instance, I suppose that there could be some potential issues. But who says that Wales' immigrants have to be Anglophones?
Oh come on. Surely you know that the Russophone immigration to Lithuania was because Lithuania was under Soviet rule, and the Soviets sent Russian colonists everywhere in order to consolidate power and Russify the region. Similar dynamics going on with Slovenia and Yugoslavia.
 
Oh come on. Surely you know that the Russophone immigration to Lithuania was because Lithuania was under Soviet rule, and the Soviets sent Russian colonists everywhere in order to consolidate power and Russify the region. Similar dynamics going on with Slovenia and Yugoslavia.

Actually, no.

If you look at the Baltic States, Lithuania received substantially fewer Russophone migrants than Latvia and Estonia. Why is this? Well, one notable difference is that whereas Lithuania continued to experience strong population growth well into the Soviet era, the number of ethnic Lithuanians rising more than 50% over this time period thanks to a high birth rate, if not for Soviet-era immigration the Latvian and Estonian populations would have stagnated. Estonia and Latvia were much more advanced in the demographic transition than their southern neighbour, meaning that they experienced much slower rates of population and labour force growth. If there was to be substantial industrial growth, it would have to come through the introduction of new workers.

That was not difficult at all to arrange, since the Baltic States were the wealthiest republics of the Soviet Union. Some of the estimates I've come across suggest that GDP per capita in the Baltic republics was on par with that of East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Yes, the Soviet leadership was certainly willing to encourage the migration of hundreds of thousands of Russophones and Slavs to the Baltics, but the Soviet leadership did not have to do much other than making it possible for people to move. There doubtless were forced transfers to the Baltic States, just as there were forced transfers from the Baltic States, but immigration to the region remained a major phenomenon driven substantially by the migrants' perception of potentially huge economic gains.

(Do I think that the Baltic States should have been able to be independent and, among other things, determine their own immigration policies? Certainly. That's quite a different thing from saying that the Baltic States were not attractive destinations. Considering a timeline where the Baltic States were not occupied by the Soviet Union but were rather able to be free and independent states, I have no doubt that these three would have become proportionally significant destinations for immigrants. Estonia and Latvia, particularly, were apparently interested just before the war in Polish migrant labour.)

As for Slovenia, it makes little sense to argue that Yugoslavia in the 1960s was a country that was trying to Yugoslavianize Slovenia. Certainly if it was, it wouldn't have gone to such great lengths to allow Slovenia to constitute itself as a substantially self-governing republic with its own institutions. In the context of the relatively free and liberal labour market of the time, meanwhile, talk of forced transfers of workers from other Yugoslav republics makes no sense. Slovenia was attracting migrant labours because, like the rest of high-income Europe at that time, it was experiencing labour shortages.

Bringing this back to Yugoslavia, again, there's no reason to think a Welsh-speaking Wales might not be a destination for significant numbers of immigrants. If anything, a Wales that remains a democratic and capitalist economy will do even better than these two former Communist bloc economies. If you don't want to mention them, fine. How about Denmark?

Communism here is replaced by economic factors that may leave East Europe less desirable as a destination until quite late in the game. Without communism you might never see the immigration of for example Vietnamese or other distant peoples to Prague or Bucharest or East Berlin, but Germany might have a big Chinese population if it kept its links to China and war still happens to push Chinese to leave, as they did to Hong Kong post civil war, and so on. It might butterfly it totally as those forces are not certain. It may still have a Turk (here Ottoman) population but only the "elite" rather than labor, akin to how Gulf State citizens flock to London or Paris for second homes and university. In other words the populations will be both job driven and refugee driven, tied in part to historic connections, UK and France to their colonies, Germany to its allies, etc. For example the USA has a Vietnamese population due to the war, here they might go to France or the UK or whomever should they have bolstered France instead. On and on as the colonial empires retract.

While I do see this and substantially agree with what you write, I think many of the linkages which led to OTL migration to southeastern and central Europe might well be replicated through other measures. A Second Republic Poland that becomes a substantial European power, for instance, might become a favoured destination of educational migrants from post-colonial Asia who want European educations but don't want to attend schools in their former colonizing powers. A liberal-democratic Czechoslovakia might give refugees from Latin America asylum. Seemingly trivial events can start substantial chains.

It's probably worth noting, again, that much depends on what this Europe looks like. If it looks anything like early 21st century Europe, where colonial powers have largely decolonized and most European countries have opted to deeply integrated with each other, that leads to one set of outcomes. This would lead to different outcomes than in a Europe lacking any kind of deep regional integration, with continuing rivalries.
 
If you look at the Baltic States, Lithuania received substantially fewer Russophone migrants than Latvia and Estonia. Why is this? Well, one notable difference is that whereas Lithuania continued to experience strong population growth well into the Soviet era, the number of ethnic Lithuanians rising more than 50% over this time period thanks to a high birth rate, if not for Soviet-era immigration the Latvian and Estonian populations would have stagnated. Estonia and Latvia were much more advanced in the demographic transition than their southern neighbour, meaning that they experienced much slower rates of population and labour force growth. If there was to be substantial industrial growth, it would have to come through the introduction of new workers.

That was not difficult at all to arrange, since the Baltic States were the wealthiest republics of the Soviet Union. Some of the estimates I've come across suggest that GDP per capita in the Baltic republics was on par with that of East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Yes, the Soviet leadership was certainly willing to encourage the migration of hundreds of thousands of Russophones and Slavs to the Baltics, but the Soviet leadership did not have to do much other than making it possible for people to move. There doubtless were forced transfers to the Baltic States, just as there were forced transfers from the Baltic States, but immigration to the region remained a major phenomenon driven substantially by the migrants' perception of potentially huge economic gains.

(Do I think that the Baltic States should have been able to be independent and, among other things, determine their own immigration policies? Certainly. That's quite a different thing from saying that the Baltic States were not attractive destinations. Considering a timeline where the Baltic States were not occupied by the Soviet Union but were rather able to be free and independent states, I have no doubt that these three would have become proportionally significant destinations for immigrants. Estonia and Latvia, particularly, were apparently interested just before the war in Polish migrant labour.)

One thing we also need to remember is that WWII caused significant population losses to the Baltic states, through Soviet-arranged population transfers, wartime deaths (for various reasons) and emigration. Without the losses caused by the war and events surrounding it, we could expect the Baltic populations being somewhat higher than IOTL in 1945 - maybe circa 10-15%

Without the war, extrapolating from the development of the Finnish demographics (which of course includes problems), we could for example expect the Estonian population be c. 1,45 million by 1970 (IOTL 1,35) and 1,55 million by 2000 (OTL 1,4, partly due to post-Soviet re-emigration to Russia) even without significant immigration, ethnic Russian or otherwise.
 
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Would there even be enough Welsh speakers in Wales for Welsh to be the primary language? If so, immigration would be quite low because people just don't want to learn Welsh when they could just learn English instead and go to the UK.


I am not sure about that.

If Wales is mostly Welsh-speaking, and is an independent state, it would be roughly comparable to OTL Slovenia and Lithuania. Those two countries have recently been significant net destinations for immigrants, Lithuania's Russophone community and Slovenia's non-Slovene Yugoslav populations coming from post-1945 migration. That Lithuanian and Slovene are minor languages in the European context was significantly less important than the attractiveness of the two countries to immigrants.

Much depends on the language dynamics of this alt-Wales. If the immigrants in Wales gravitate towards the Anglophone minority, for instance, I suppose that there could be some potential issues. But who says that Wales' immigrants have to be Anglophones?

Let's just say that in this ATL, Wales's language frontiers stay something comparable to otl 1800 in which the only anglophone regions were South Pembrokeshire and Radnorshire and some other spots along the border. If this stays the case, then the Anglophone areas would largely be rural, with the exception of Wrexham, with the industrial areas being Welsh-speaking. Thus, if you were to migrate to an anglophone region of Wales in this ATL, there wouldn't be much to migrate to in the way of jobs, perhaps with the exception of Wrexham.

As for the TL of a Wales that goes independent in 1922, I don't see it attracting many immigrants early on. In the inter-war period, otl Wales suffered really badly with its heavy industries in crisis. Thus in the interwar period, Wales would be a net emigration country, like in OTL. Hopefully that would change later on.
 

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One thing we also need to remember is that WWII caused significant population losses to the Baltic states, through Soviet-arranged population transfers, wartime deaths (for various reasons) and emigration. Without the losses caused by the war and events surrounding it, we could expect the Baltic populations being somewhat higher than IOTL in 1945 - maybe circa 10-15%.
I can't comment for Latvia and Estonia, but definitely more than that for Lithuania. Modern calculations put that Lithuania lost upwards of one million people through deportations, mass emigration, repressions, war deaths and the Holocaust during the period from 1940 to 1953, and it's safe to say that Lithuania could have 4-5 million people today if all of those events never happened.
 
I can't comment for Latvia and Estonia, but definitely more than that for Lithuania. Modern calculations put that Lithuania lost upwards of one million people through deportations, mass emigration, repressions, war deaths and the Holocaust during the period from 1940 to 1953, and it's safe to say that Lithuania could have 4-5 million people today if all of those events never happened.

Yes, we can say that I was careful with the estimate not to overstate my case. With my highly unscientific method of assuming Baltic population growth to be roughly similar to the Finnish developments, extrapolating from the early 1920s numbers Lithuania would have 3,9 million people now instead of 2,8 million.

The point stands and is even stronger: without WWII, the Nazi occupation, and the Soviet occupation and annexation, the Baltic states would have seen better population growth and would not have necessarily needed outside immigration to develop economically.

This of course does not take into account the potential work-related voluntary emigration (to Western Europe, to the US, etc) from the Baltic area in a no-Soviet Union, no-WWII timeline which could/would have caused at least some population loss.
 
Yes, we can say that I was careful with the estimate not to overstate my case. With my highly unscientific method of assuming Baltic population growth to be roughly similar to the Finnish developments, extrapolating from the early 1920s numbers Lithuania would have 3,9 million people now instead of 2,8 million.

The point stands and is even stronger: without WWII, the Nazi occupation, and the Soviet occupation and annexation, the Baltic states would have seen better population growth and would not have necessarily needed outside immigration to develop economically.

This of course does not take into account the potential work-related voluntary emigration (to Western Europe, to the US, etc) from the Baltic area in a no-Soviet Union, no-WWII timeline which could/would have caused at least some population loss.
You could also make the case that without Communist occupation, the Baltics (and rest of Eastern Europe) wouldn't be going through the population bottleneck they have right now.
 
If the IMF numbers are to be believed...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_past_and_projected_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
1980 Communist Poland GDP per capita: 4753
1980 Germany GDP per capita: 11273

So the ratio Germany to Poland during the height of Communism is (3/1) and in 1938 (3/1) as the map on the last page showed worse than today (1.7/1). There's definitely post comunist development but the EU subsidies and extra trust in the Polish economy due to being inside the EU should not be ignored. Without WW2 and the Cold War there is no EU.
 
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