"SOFIA, Bulgaria -- When Nicko Aleksiev left this city for France, in 2011, he didn't expect he would ever live in Bulgaria again.
But after the pandemic hit, Mr. Aleksiev was laid off, and -- like tens of thousands of other foreign workers in Western Europe -- he headed home in June 2020. Now, after more than a year here, he has a job in Sofia and no intention of going abroad again.
After decades of mass migration from former Eastern Bloc countries to more lucrative opportunities in the West, the flow of people in Europe is showing signs of reversing.
In Estonia, returnees to the country have outpaced emigrants since 2017. Net migration to Poland has been in the black since 2016. And the trend has accelerated during the pandemic. Lithuania, which has lost a quarter of its citizens since 1990, saw a slight uptick in population last year, as Covid-19 halted the waves of emigration that had long drained the country of young people.
Nowhere has the turnaround been more dramatic than in Bulgaria.
Before the pandemic, Bulgaria was projected to be the second-fastest-shrinking country in the world behind Lithuania, according to United Nations projections. Its population has fallen from nearly 9 million in the late 1980s to roughly 7 million today.
Last year, however, net migration to the country was positive for the first time in more than a decade. Some 30,000 more people moved to Bulgaria than left the country in 2020, the most of them Bulgarian citizens.
Now, the question is whether those returnees will stay. The answer will have major implications for both sides of the continent. Western European countries are confronting record labor shortages, with many jobs that usually are filled by foreign workers open. And in countries like Bulgaria, return migrants would be a boon to economies that have bled skilled workers and young people for a generation.
"The wave of people leaving Central and Eastern Europe and going west has crested," said Ognyan Georgiev, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Last year, he conducted a study that found tens of thousands of Bulgarians who had been living abroad long-term had come home as Covid hit.
"A significant percentage of them might stay," he said. "That's really an economic boost -- not just for Bulgaria, but for countries like Romania and Poland. There's been a realization that you can have a good quality of life back in Eastern Europe."
When Mr. Aleksiev returned to Sofia last year, the 29-year-old thought the move might be temporary. But he quickly decided to stay. Though he makes about half of what he did working at the airport in Nice, France, he said the money goes much further here. Many of his friends from high school -- a French immersion school that typically sends many graduates abroad -- also have come home.
"Sofia surprised me," he said. "It gives a lot of opportunities, even better than some Western cities, in terms of quality of life."
Overall, however, quality of life in Bulgaria lags far behind most of Europe. It is the poorest country in the European Union, and distrust of government institutions is rampant. Less than 30% of citizens are vaccinated against Covid-19, the lowest rate in the bloc.
Magdalena Kostova, a demographer at Bulgaria's National Statistical Institute, said she was skeptical that many of the returnees would stay long-term. Economic opportunities, education and access to basic services remained far better elsewhere in Europe, she said." [1]
According to the United Nations, Lithuania was the fastest disappearing country in the world before the pandemic. What a wonderful fact ... Lithuanian businessmen and politicians are to be congratulated. Dear ones, you have already set a world record, only our sold-out media do not tell you that. Nowhere in the world is it worse than in Lithuania - wages are too low in relation to prices.
1. World News: Eastern Europe's Shrinking Population Gets Covid Boost
Lovett, Ian. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 30 Dec 2021: A.9.
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