Europe’s Anti-Immigrant Leaders Have a Secret

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Satwinder Singh caused quite a stir when he arrived in Sarud, a sleepy Hungarian village, four years ago. He was among a handful of guest workers who’d been brought over from India to work at a dairy farm that was struggling to stay afloat because of a labor shortage. The locals weren’t welcoming.

Speaking on a recent morning, he described being pelted with eggs by some townsfolk. Others called him a terrorist. Some of Sarud’s residents took their concerns straight to their mayor. “Someone came to me saying the Indians will inject poison into the milk and contaminate the whole country,” recalls Istvan Tilcsik. “Then people saw they just came to work and never had run-ins with the law. Things have settled down now.”

Hungary’s prime minister would probably prefer that Singh and his compatriots go unnoticed. Viktor Orban heads an anti-immigrant vanguard inside the European Union, which he claims to protect from “invaders.” He’s erected barbed-wire fences to keep out refugees and withheld food from some housed in detention centers. U.S. President Donald Trump says he’s like a “twin brother.”

Yet Hungary and other nearby nations with an anti-immigrant bent are quietly nudging open a back door to foreigners. Central and Eastern Europe are the fastest-growing part of the European Union, and with declining birth rates and the departure of millions of workers to Europe’s richer west, homegrown labor forces can’t fill companies’ demands.

In recent years, governments have been willing to admit white, Christian workers from such places as Ukraine and Belarus. But that supply is drying up. Now migrants from far-flung corners of the world have begun to arrive, challenging the notion that this corner of the continent can remain sheltered from Western-style multiculturalism.

The labor force of the 21 countries between the Baltic Sea and the Balkans will shrink by more than a quarter by 2050, lopping over 1 percentage point a year off economic growth, according to the International Monetary Fund. Deputy Managing Director Tao Zhang told central bankers from the region in July that their countries must start importing workers to help address the issue.

It’s already happening.

In Hungary, the EU’s fastest-growing economy, there were 49,500 work permits held by non-EU citizens in 2018, more than double the previous year’s figure. In 2016, there were about 7,300. While Ukrainians held more than half of them, Vietnamese, Indians and Mongolians are now among the groups growing quickest.

Romania boosted the number of permits for non-EU workers by 50% this year, with Sri Lankans and Indians joining Chinese and Turkish employees at restaurants and construction sites. In Poland, crews of Mongolian women paint newly built Warsaw apartment buildings.

In Belgrade, ethnic Albanians are working alongside locals to turn the Serbian government’s vision for a swanky new waterfront complex into reality. On a recent visit, President Aleksandar Vucic expressed amazement at how economic need was trumping a history of ethnic tensions.

South Korea’s Hankook Tire this month delayed a $295 million investment at its factory in Hungary because of difficulties in recruiting employees. About 200 of its existing 3,000 workers at the plant are from Ukraine and Mongolia.

Governments have attempted to lift birth rates by offering generous tax benefits and other perks for would-be parents, yet at a demography conference in Budapest this month, Orban, Vucic, and Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis conceded they hadn’t found the magic formula.

And they don’t like talking about their stopgap solution. They continue to beat the anti-immigrant drum without mentioning the new workers from farther afield.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who faces elections next month, fired a deputy minister in 2018 for going “way too far” when advocating more foreign workers.

In Hungary, the Orban-controlled media dishes out a daily diet of anti-immigrant news, and the government maintains a state of emergency over mass immigration that, in reality, has plunged. Orban himself touts “ethnic homogeneity” as being good for business, keeping the country safe.

Attitudes among the public may be thawing. In the eastern Croatian town of Petrijevci, the local meat-processing plant hired 17 butchers from Nepal to fill vacant positions. Residents, many of whom had never met someone from so far away, collected clothes for one worker after his luggage was lost in transit.

Back in Sarud, which lies a 90-minute drive east of Budapest and old ladies sell homegrown fruit and vegetables outside their homes, the Indian workers’ appearance has also shifted opinion.

Margit Demeter, for one, is starting to doubt what she sees on TV. “We hear a lot bad things about migrants, but I can’t say anything bad about the ones here,” says the 66-year-old. “We could just as easily be in their shoes. And what about all the Hungarians who went abroad to live or work? Are we going to say bad things about them, too?” —With Andra Timu, Irina Vilcu, Radoslav Tomek, Adrian Krajewski, Lenka Ponikelska, Volodymyr Verbyany, Jan Bratanic, Ott Ummelas, and Misha Savic

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew Langley at alangley1@bloomberg.net, Cristina Lindblad

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