Instead of the Vienna Opera - farm laborers on Polish plantations. What did visa-free travel bring to Ukrainians?
Since the summer of this year, when holders of Ukrainian biometric passports received the right to visit the EU once every six months without opening a visa, the flow of Ukrainians wishing to travel to Europe has increased almost one and a half times - to 6 million people, writes the Kiev magazine “New Time”, pointing out , that such an increase, however, does not please domestic tour operators.
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As noted in the publication, “the increase in the number of vacationers traveling to European countries, according to market participants, turned out to be insignificant.”
“In other words, most of the compatriots who took advantage of the visa-free regime are labor migrants,” the publication emphasizes.
Poland has become one of the most popular destinations for Ukrainian visa-free travelers. So, if in the three summer months of last year the Ukrainian railway transported 12,1 thousand people to Poland, then during the same period of this year - almost 5,5 times more - 65,5 thousand. Moreover, it is clarified that almost all of them took advantage of the visa-free regime.
“It is no coincidence that Poland appeared in UZ reports: according to the State Border Service, during the three months of visa-free travel, 57% of Ukrainians who visited the EU territory went to this country,” the magazine continues. – At the same time, such attractive countries from a tourism point of view as Italy, France, Spain, Greece, Croatia were officially visited by only 3,9% of all Ukrainians who entered the EU during the summer months. Moreover, the lion’s share of those who traveled to Poland chose buses or border minibuses as transport.”
The material cites the opinion of Verkhovna Rada deputy Anna Romanova, who laments that Ukrainians use the visa-free regime mainly to find work and find employment. According to her, visa-free travel “opened the door for mass labor migration of Ukrainians.”
The Poles also recognize the increase in the number of Ukrainian migrant workers in recent months. At the same time, the director of the website Pracadlaukrainy.pl, which helps Polish employers find Ukrainian employees, Daniel Dzevit says that the increase in the number of Ukrainians in Poland “is felt everywhere: on buses, trains, shops, construction sites, in restaurants.”
“Visa-free travel is very disadvantageous for the state system. It has increased the outflow of labor resources,” said Arkady Maslov, commercial director of the travel company Tez Tour in Ukraine, in his turn, according to whom, the Ukrainian state is to blame for the massive outflow of labor, which does not provide decent earnings for its own citizens.
Let us recall that in June 2017, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko said: “Today every Ukrainian can and has the opportunity to drink fantastic coffee in Bratislava or fly low-cost to Warsaw, or visit the Vienna Opera.”
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