http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/12/international/europe/12migrate.html?

December 12, 2005

Migration's Flip Side: One Big Empty Nest
By DAN BILEFSKY

TURKI, Latvia, Dec. 6 - In this poor but proud farming region, where many of
the small wooden houses have no electricity and people still read by
candlelight, nearly every third home sits empty. Their occupants have gone
to pick mushrooms in Ireland.

When Laima Muktupavela left more than three years ago, she moved into a
dusty three-room house near Dublin with 11 other Latvians and
picked mushrooms from 6 a.m. to sundown. The farm's owner forbade the
Latvians to wear gloves and the mushrooms quickly turned her fingers black.
She sautéed mushrooms for breakfast, lunch and dinner. She earned about 215
euros, or about $254, a week - more than one and a half times the monthly
minimum wage back home - and splurged on a new gray wool coat.

Back in Latvia, her four children felt abandoned. Her 16-year-old daughter,
Anna, sent angry letters in envelopes filled with her baby pictures. Her
partner, who is now her husband, met someone else.

Tormented by the prospect of permanent exile, Ms. Muktupavela returned to
Latvia. She wrote a book about her experiences, "The Mushroom Covenant,"
which tapped into the national fear about the growing exodus of Latvians to
Ireland. It became a best seller.
"There is hardly a family left in this country who hasn't lost a son or
daughter or mother or father to the mushroom farms of Ireland," said Ms.
Muktupavela, 43.

She pointed to a vast field peppered with abandoned houses, their occupants
departed to the handful of European Union countries - Ireland, Sweden,
Britain - that opened their borders to the bloc's newest members when they
joined in May 2004.
Freedom to cross the European Union's borders unhindered was a reward of
membership that natives in this Baltic country of 2.3 million people aspired
to after 50 years of Soviet occupation.

But as other European Union nations grapple with whether to admit low-wage
laborers from Eastern and Central Europe, fearful that doing so will
undermine their social standards, the case of Latvia shows how migration can
exact a heavy toll on the country they leave behind.
While there are no official statistics, Latvian officials estimate that
50,000 to 100,000 people have emigrated over the last 18 months, as many as
25,000 of them to Ireland. In the latest high-profile departure, Latvians
watched with horror last month when the Olympic biathlete Jekabs Nakums
announced on television that he was leaving to wash cars in Ireland.

The exodus of economic migrants from Eastern Europe to their wealthier
neighbors in the West has been a growing phenomenon since the European
Union's expansion last year. But the trend has been particularly pronounced
in Latvia because the country's average monthly minimum wage of 90 lats, or
about $154, is the lowest in the 25-member bloc, while price increases since
accession have been highest here.
The Latvian government hopes the emigrants will come back, equipped with new
skills and languages. But migration studies suggest that two-thirds will
never return.

"During the cold war, we all dreamed of leaving," Ms. Muktupavela said, "but
the risk is that if everyone leaves, then the country will disappear."
The voluntary emigration of so many Latvians has a particularly painful
resonance in a country where up to 100,000 people were deported to Siberia
in the years after Soviet occupation began in 1940 as part of the Kremlin's
effort to make the country more like Russia.
Many Latvians fear that the current exodus is destroying the country's
social fabric.

In the Latgale farming region here in eastern Latvia, parents who emigrate
to Ireland to pick mushrooms often leave their children behind, creating a
new generation of what residents call "mushroom orphans."

In Riga, more than 100 children aged 14 or younger are living alone or with
family friends, according to the International Organization for Migration.
In September, there was a national outcry when a 7-year-old girl got lost on
the way home from school and it was discovered that her parents were in
Ireland.

Ms. Muktupavela, who has been documenting the emigration in a collection of
short stories, recently visited Turki, a small village in Latgale, where
residents said they were counting the days until the village disappeared
from the map. Faced with a new loneliness, a group of Latgalians meet
regularly at Turki's public library - a log cabin lit by candles - to
discuss how the exodus is affecting their town.
Valiya Vecele, 62, a pensioner, said she was becoming nostalgic for the
Russian occupation.

"At least then, everyone had work and we went to parties," she said. "Now we
sit around. We sit, and we wait."
Although the emigration has actually given Latvia a short-term economic
lift - the World Bank estimates that funds sent home by migrants amount to
about $272 million annually - economists say this benefit is being offset by
a brain drain in important sectors such as construction, nursing and
medicine.

And while European Union membership has helped spur a development boom in
Riga, construction companies complain that there are too few qualified
workers.

Marcis Nikolajevs, managing director of an association of Latvian
construction contractors, said companies were being forced to import workers
from nearby Ukraine and Belarus. The association also is considering flying
in temporary construction workers from Ghana. "We used to be a proud
people," he said. "This migration is a national tragedy."

A shortage of doctors and nurses has also gripped the country because so
many have left to work in hospitals in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, where the
pay is better.

Dr. Harijs Knesis, an anesthesiologist at the Ars Medical Clinic in Riga,
said he was considering emigrating to the United States. "Doctors are
getting rich in the U.S. and Europe, while we work for nothing," he said.