Daiva Skučienė, Beatričė Kazakevičiūtė
Sociologijos institutas, Lietuvos socialinių tyrimų centras.
The migrants from Ukraine and Belarus are the most numerous during the last five years in Lithuania. The number of migrants from Ukraine increased from 1245 persons in 2015 to 9370 persons in 2020. At the same time, the number of migrants from Belarus risen from 501 in 2015 to 7385 in 2020. The mass media of the country, trade union and business focuses on that phenomenon publically. The companies require more flexibility for the legal framework of migration because of the lack of a national labour force. The mass media and trade union highlights the precarious work of migrants from these countries in a public space.
The research works about migrants from Ukraine and Belarus in Lithuania working conditions; their subjective well-being is lack. At the same time, the international academic space analyzes the migration theories (Massey et all,1993), the migrant’s position in the labour market (Ballarino and Panichella,2018; Wright and Clibborn, 2019), their social integration and subjective well-being (Hendriks and. Burger, 2019; Bretones et all, 2020) and etc. Our research tries to answer in following questions: How will cost-benefit analysis of migrants interplay with the cultural similarity of the post-soviet countries? How that combination has an impact on the migrants social and labour market integration? What is the necessity to invest in human capital of migrants for better integration in the labour market and society? What is the legal regulation of migration and employment of migrants in a country? What is the subjective well-being of migrants from Ukraine and Belarus in Lithuania?
Thus, the research aims to analyze the labour market, social integration, and subjective well-being of migrants from Ukraine and Belarus in Lithuania. We hope that our study added new knowledge about the migration phenomenon in the post-soviet context. To implement the aim, we based on subjective integration (Dustmann et al., 2013; Dickey et all,2018) and investment in the human capital model as the basis for the labour market and societal integration (Kogan, 2006). 20 semi-structured interviews with migrants from Ukraine and Belarus were used to analyze their individual integration experiences in the labour market, society and subjective well-being. Ten of them were with migrants from Ukraine and the last 10 with migrants from Belarus. The interviews were collected in 2021, February –March, with the help of the International Organization for Migration office in Lithuania. The data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis.
XIII Lietuvos sociologų draugijos konferencija 