Estonian Cooperation Assembly Comments on Emigration Trends
According to what declared by Estonian Cooperation Assembly head Peep Mühls and to Tartu University demography experts around 130.000 Estonians live outside Estonia.
In addition to them Mühls said that there are around 1.06 million people in the world who identify themselves as Estonians between people who expatriated long time ago and their offspring, even if they are citizens of other countries and they do not speak Estonian anymore.
Commenting the trend of leaving the country, the Cooperation Assembly said that the country has two main tendencies: the ageing of the population and the constant decrease of number people.
Presenting some recent researches, Mühls explained a change in the emigration trend as, since once men in the best working age were mainly leaving Estonia, now it is women who have graduated from university and are in the best working age, 25-35, who leave.
The wage difference of men and women in Estonia is one of the biggest in the EU which, as Mülhs said, could be one of the reasons why, right now, are mainly women who leave Estonia. Moreover, when women with higher education leave the country, they will probably create a family abroad and will not return.
This is why they send abroad some pretty estonians girls to trap some young and smart foreigners to make them come, live and work in Estonia !
Ehm, haven't seen it from that perspective yet. Now this whole thing makes perfectly sense: Sell the women to the West as promoters to make to come male foreigners to Estonia to rip them off.
But seriously, I live now for three years in Estonia and have seen no other country (besides in many countries with a major muslim population) where women are that much treated as 2nd class people down to where women become even less than human beings.
The more disturbing thing is that women in Estonia often even do not get this and even support the opinion of their "slaveholder", let themself to be exploited rather then to stand up against that or even raise questions.
The longer I live here, the less I do understand how Estonia could have become part of European Union.
Where the EU inspectors literally blind on both eyes when checking what "values" this society is made of here? Because most of the European values of the old member states simply does not apply here, especially, but not limited, what comes to women rights, which is morelike closely equivalent to many places in the middle-east or countries like Thailand.
It's a sad fact I have to acknowledge.
Finally.
The comparison between Estonia and Thailand is something not new to me – still, Knut, you also can imagine which kind of criticism I got when I tried to explain my point in this sense.
EU officials buy anything that sounds like a reliable nowadays but, honestly, the things that bugs me the most is exactly the attitude many local women have of defending the system ruling this country.
Still, since the topic of this page is immigration and we are immigrants, I would not mind getting Your point on the way the Estonian society is actually reaching qualified immigrants nowadays…
Are you happy with that?
Hello Giovanni,
What comes to the attitude of to many women defending the behave of society toward them "as is", I noticed that too for many years and to some extent you might say that in Estonia the biggest "enemy" of a female is another female.
In my opinion, the reasons are deverse I can't address all here, but most importantly, since the collapse of Sovjet Union, inequality became quite popular for obvious reasons, since in Sovjet Union, people shall be all equal (but some more equal, as we know it), and people wanted to be different.
It's not the fault of the current or any other government since 1991 in Estonia, but Estonia and it's recent development of society and it's problems toward women, as well many other problems, for example health issue to men due to unhealthy lifestyle (drinking problems and so on), are a result of the fast economic transition, de-industrialization of ailing Sovjet heavy industry that deployed a lot of people, where traditional mainly men where working on and so on.
Well, you get the point and in my opinion, there's not much that could have had avoided such a situation, temporary.
"Officially", women were equal in Sovjet Union. Well, that was not the whole truth, ofcourse, but the thing is that now women became what they have seen as the "promoted" standard in Western media and elsehow, to be sexual, objects to men, to be competitive with each other and that money (of men) is some sort of private wealth fare state, and then on the other hand
another type of females (the emigrating part), for which is hardly any room in other forms than success performance as a professional success.
Hoewever, this all leads to a society of a "dog-in-the-manger attitude", where is not much room for any empathy.
Meanwhile a lot of women took the challenge to take all this "promoted" stress to be perfect in business and family life (what they have seen to be as a perfect "Western" role model, from romance stories of a princess to the tuff business women in sexy skirts, which sometimes unveils quite bizarre lifestyles), men tendencially more often passed out with a mixture of
unhealthy drink attitudes up to little nationalism to compensate their drab existence…
Meanwhile it is not fully understandable to me, why the path of men and women went in different directions that strenghten the traditional role models we have nowadays more often in Estonia, one explanation is that from scientistic point of view we now nowadays that (economic) stress acts differently on women and men.
Stress makes all people sick, but women and men deal with that in a different way.
For example, women are more affected by professional overload (burn-out syndrome) and in men, the stress is mainly results in depressions.
However, to now make the point to how to reach qualified immigrants, a society must be attractive to them, and I don't mean the promotion of sexual local women in mini skirts, that only attracts sextourists and like nobody wants and need in a country from prosper perspective (but also from medical and other perspectives).
For this, besides proper immigration policies, Estonia needs to fix its broke society in the first place.
Especially, Estonia must solve issues between the sexes, or else no qualified immigrants come that nowadays, within the European Union, on average would mean 70% of qualified personell are women by university degree (but also inside Estonia,
the current situation of local women is a big waste of skilled women that are not available to the market, simply because of "traditional" lifestyle).
At the moment, a significant part of immigrants are male and come to Estonia, not because the labour market is way attractive to them or that they are all of a high skilled value to the Estonian labour market, but exactly through local women (not to less to escape from their "feminist unsexy local women" in the West, but mostly the same way in the other direction what comes to emigration of women, that even strenghten traditional family "values" in Estonia and elsewhere, tendencially.
Is this a happy situation? Well, to me, as an emancipated man, I am certainly not that happy to be seen by local women as a walking credit card or some sort of wealthfare insurance because of my citizenship, because I think it is more of a calculated family "business model" than what naturally makes you want to interrelate with someone what comes to private life .
Anyway, what the government could do is to promote different lifestyles to women and men, but also to give more options to them. Let it be making it more attractive toward women to work and addressing the issue of a lost generation of men.
A mature part would be done through the educational system. Strenghten women and men in media competence and gender awareness through, let's say, "media studies" and "gender studies" or however you may call that, such awarnesses that are commonly to be found in Western countries, but merely absent in Estonia and in other post-Sovjet countries.
It should be understood, that a lot more has to be done than just addressing (gender) issues in the society to attract qualified immigrants, though.
But since a lot of potential immigrants would be women, and, to lessen the emigration of skilled local women, gender issues do have a higher impact on immigration-emigration rates than any other figure related to that.
If no government in Estonia does face these facts and don't fight that issues anytime soon, we likely will have the situation in Estonia to be widespreadly found in Eastern parts of Germany for example, which means a lack of women and a high percentage of frustrated men that tendencially are deployed and let out their frustration in right extremism that makes the country even more unattractive to qualified immigrants to come to live and work in Estonia and drains the economic situation further downwards.
"If no government in Estonia does face these facts and don't fight that issues anytime soon, we likely will have the situation in Estonia to be widespreadly found in Eastern parts of Germany for example, which means a lack of women and a high percentage of frustrated men"
I do not know if the relation you then made with extremism would be valid also here but, indeed, you have a point.
Unfortunately the Government is too focused on a) getting the euro / b) finding bullet proof excuses in case the SEC will not come to Estonia to consider gender inequality AND its derivatives as a problem worth any kind of serious efforts.
But "the biggest "enemy" of a female is another female." is an incredible truth.
"I do not know if the relation you then made with extremism would be valid also here but, indeed, you have a point."
Usually, frustation leads to some sort of extreme views as a reasioning. Ofcourse, the Eastern German example must not apply in this way in Estonia.
From other failed liberal societies we know (Venezuela, for instance), that one other option would be (national focused) socialism. Maybe from historic point of view a more liekly option for Estonia, since such tendencies you can already measure lately (and it's worrying that this happens already within 20 years, Estonia got rid of communism).
I don't know if organizations such as CATO institute have an answer already to that.
But it's worth to take a closer look into, what is actually happening to the human development in liberal societies within a major crisis, because I think this is currently still a weakness of liberal societies and such vulnerability becomes a problem when a certain tipping point is reached.
This all what I wrote can be also backed up by figures, I'd like to add.
For example, Estonia has the highest gender wage gap across Europe (30%+) as well the highest divorce rate (nearby 60%) and the participation of women as candidates in last parliamentary elections has been 21% only, which is even a lower rate than the candidate rate of women in Iraq's current elections with 28% and has one of the lowest life expectancy of men.
These figure are just the tip of the iceberg, but it is hardly to disagree that these figures are not acceptable for a country inside the European Union and needs efforts for significant improvements.
A lot can be done through public awareness and public debates alone, which is very cost efficient, so there's no excuse that because of the crisis, Estonia could not afford such efforts, since also such a budget would be supported by EU's assets pott.
Unfortunate, Estonia is not very strong in such public relations, which also leads to the situation, that people are not only uninformed, but also causes an extreme low demand in political interest.
Btw, sorry for the typos, since i don't have time to check my texts against spell mistakes.
No worries about the typos!