Baltic Studies Newsletter #102: contents - next article

BSN #102-01
The Bloody Balts! A Phenomenological Approach to Understanding Adjustment of Baltic Migrants to Australia
Arthur Cropley, Emeritus Professor, University of Hamburg
This article is the result of the Baltic Office's invitation to present a lecture on 23rd March 2000, with the original title: "The Flaming Balts: The Post World War II Latvians in Australia Through the Eyes of the Locals"

Approaches to Studying Migration
Social science research on migration has traditionally been dominated by sociological, demographic and economic approaches. Beginning with the seminal work of Ravenstein (1885), which was based on census data, the "classical" studies such as Thomas and Znaniecki (1927) or Wirth (1928) were mainly descriptive. Heberle (1955) concluded that, even 70 years after Ravenstein, research was still using an approach developed towards the end of the 19th century. Of particular interest for the present paper was the conclusion of Jacobs and Koeppel (1974) and Pryor (1981) that there was a severe scarcity of research emphasizing the psyche of the migrant. Typical studies regarded migration as the result of a more or less objective, rational decision-making process in which potential gains resulting from migration are weighed against possible losses, the decision then falling according to which way the scales tip. Originally, gains and losses were defined politically, demographically, economically and socially (e.g., freedom of movement and association, employment, housing, schooling, etc).
The "External" Approach
Cropley and Lüthke (1994) called this the "external" approach. The personality of migrants is taken into account in only a rudimentary way, for instance by positing that personality determines what a particular person regards as a significant gain or loss, since different people have different goals and ambitions. Even at its most sophisticated the external approach offers limited psychological perspectives, scarcely going beyond looking at factors such as individual differences in willingness to take a risk.
Where people face social and political turmoil leading to loss of freedom, financial ruin, loss of rights, even persecution as a result of the actions of an occupying power-as was the case for many citizens of the Baltic states during and after the second world war-the plausibility of the external approach is obvious: Migration brought personal and social freedom and for some, even survival. Just as important for many, emigration promised a better life for the children. So convincing are objective privations as an explanation of migration that migrants typically refer to them when they are asked about their reasons for migrating, even when they have not actually suffered political social and economic upheavals. In an investigation of several hundred German migrants to Australia in the 1980s, Cropley and Lüthke (1990) showed that these people gave great prominence to factors like lack of economic opportunities, limitations of political and social freedom, scarcity of housing, and unemployment when discussing their reasons for emigrating, despite the fact that most of them had well-paid jobs and attractive housing.
In the older literature, aspects of the original society that migrants wish to escape, such as political upheaval, famine, poverty, persecution, intolerance, imprisonment, or torture were referred to as "push" factors. Advantages of the receiving society (political stability, freedom, economic prosperity, etc) are "pull" factors. Until recently the idea of emigration as an action based on the desire to maximize gains (by escaping push factors almost completely and gaining the most attractive pull factors) at the minimum cost (by going to the society that is most hospitable) more or less defined the limits of thinking about the psychology of migration, apparently even in the minds of migrants themselves.
Inadequacies of this Approach
Lüthke (1989) showed, however, that migration ebbs and flows even in the absence of catastrophes such as those mentioned above. Without denigrating the importance of immediate, acute "push" factors, Cropley, Lüthke and Becker (1986) conducted an analysis of German migration to Australia in the first 30 years after the second world war and showed that migration peaked when the German society was experiencing the Wirtschaftswunder [economic miracle] of the 1960s and fell off as times got worse, the opposite of what would be predicted by a strictly rational, economically-oriented, profit and loss model.
Furthermore, Germans did not necessarily seek to go to the country offering the most attractive pull factors. A study of reasons given for wanting to emigrate (Cropley & Lüthke, 1990) revealed that they were often irrational (e.g., a millionaire bakery owner who claimed that it was impossible to get ahead in Germany and that he was afraid of the social effects of unemployment, the response being to emigrate to Australia, a country with higher taxation, more rigid unionization, widespread hostility to entrepreneurial endeavor, higher interest rates, a less productive work force and higher unemployment). Many applicants knew little of Australia and claimed advantages that did not correspond to reality: for instance lower unemployment in Australia whereas it was actually higher at the time, or lower interest rates where they too were actually higher.
Cropley, Lüthke and Becker (1986) also showed that the ebb and flow of applications for visas to emigrate from Germany reflected the prominence given to emigration in the German mass media. However, peaks in the flow of applications followed relevant reports in the media, suggesting that would-be migrants were reacting to the media rather than the reverse. Media reports generated Torschlusspanik (fear of missing out) in people toying with the idea of emigrating, and thus energized or activated latent tendencies. Moreover, when asked why they wanted to emigrate respondents tended to give reasons that were currently in vogue in print and electronic media-Cropley and Lüthke (1995) referred to the "hit parade" of reasons-regardless of whether or not the "reasons" given matched their own situation.
Finally, according to a survey cited by Cropley, Lüthke and Becker (1986), only a small percentage of Germans were even contemplating migrating at the time. If migration is driven by unpleasant conditions in the original society linked with desirable conditions in the receiving society, why were the apparent hardships in Germany and perceived advantages in Australia visible to only a small percentage of Germans? Furthermore, these were not the most disadvantaged: very few of several hundred consecutive, unselected applicants for an Australian immigrant visa studied by Cropley, Lüthke and Becker (1986) were unemployed, and their average income was virtually identical with that of a matched control group of people who rejected the idea of emigrating. Many of the visa applicants were well off and highly qualified.
Emigrating involves a momentous decision surpassing all other decisions in its effects on the person's future life. How can people who are enjoying a comfortable lifestyle surrounded by family and friends (the typical German migrant to Australia in the 1980s) justify the plunge into the unknown represented by emigration? They do this by adopting "reasons" that are enjoying a kind of semiofficial blessing by being given prominence in the mass media. At work are cognitive processes like social desirability or dissonance reduction, whose function is to make the decision to emigrate seem rational both to other people and to the migrants themselves. The effects of these processes are not apparent to the migrants and thus cannot be articulated by them when they discuss their own behavior. The result is that the "real," or in our terms here the "internal" motivation is hidden by what everyday language would call "rationalizations."

The "Internal" Model
External economic, social and political conditions may well energize migration behavior in what Lüthke and Cropley (1983) called "emigration prone" people, as well as steering it to some degree-the flow of migrants is largely, although not exclusively, from poorer to richer countries or from more to less repressive regimes-but they do not plant willingness to migrate where it does not exist. The role of external conditions is like that of rain and sunshine on a garden: without them seeds will not germinate, it is true, but no amount of rain and sunshine will bring forth plants where the seed is not there to be activated in the first place. Migration also needs to be studied from the point of view of factors internal to the psyche of migrants, as these constitute the necessary seed. Knowledge of these factors makes it possible to understand better the strong, apparently irrational elements of migration behavior (including non-migration where external circumstances suggest it is the only sensible alternative), as well as the processes of psychological adjustment experienced by immigrants. The purpose of the present paper is not to spell out the Cropley-Lüthke approach in detail, but it can be said here that they called for an "internal" model of the psychology of migration. In an empirical exploration of the "hidden" aspects of migration, they concluded (Cropley & Lüthke, 1994, 1995) that migration/nonmigration and adjustment are largely controlled by "dynamic" factors rooted in the personality of the individual. These are only accessible via in-depth procedures such as probing interviews, intensive encounter type group sessions with other would-be migrants, or even psychoanalytically-oriented procedures. The dynamic aspects are not related to profit and loss considerations in the political/demographic/economic sense, but to aspects of personality like attachment/detachment, individuation/dependency, power/helplessness, control/self-determination, or sense of community/estrangement, and cannot satisfactorily be understood via a purely external approach.
It may be argued that external factors are often utterly compelling, as they were for many Baltic citizens in the first years after the second world war. In such cases a discussion of internal aspects of migration seems to be completely superfluous: It would be difficult to convince Latvians, Lithuanians or Estonians who left camps in Europe to go to Sweden, the United States, Canada or Australia that they were not motivated by the desire for better life conditions. Nonetheless, even here there was usually a choice, unpalatable though one of the alternatives was (i.e., return to the Baltic states under Soviet rule). No one was transported after the second world war to North America or the other countries just mentioned in chains!
The possibility of returning or staying rather than fleeing is explored in the fiction of the Estonian writer Jaan Kross, who was himself within hours of fleeing in 1944 and also had an opportunity in 1978, but who like one of his characters could not go "when a million had to stay" (cited by Salumets, 2000). Kross's writings are full of a sense of loss and of the struggle for identity, dignity and worth (i.e., of internal factors in the sense outlined above). His personal situation also offers an example of a conflict between external motivation (desire for freedom, physically comfortable life and the like) that dictated one course of action (going), and internal motivation (retention of identity, sense of worth and dignity) that demanded another (staying).

Internal Factors in the Adjustment of Migrants
Alienation
The purpose of the present paper is not to reconstruct the motivation of migrants, especially the people who did not return to the Baltic in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but to look at the processes of adjustment they experienced after migrating. In their new countries these people were faced with certain aspects of the dynamic that Kross described: the need to cope with loss and estrangement as the price of the better way of life. This dialectic was examined in some detail by Kovacs and Cropley (1975) in a study of about 150 Eastern European migrants to Australia in 1953 (mainly Hungarians, Poles and Ukrainians, but including 32 people from the Baltic states). They referred to it as a problem of "alienation" centering on detachment from the homeland and associated feelings of estrangement and loss. As Masumbuku (1995) showed in a study of Eastern European migrants to Germany, disruptions of this kind can lead to disturbances of mood (anxiety, depression, aggressiveness), of social behavior (isolation, alcoholism, even violence), or to psychosomatic disturbances (headaches, sleeplessness, ulcers). Detaching oneself from the homeland has formal elements, culminating in naturalization. I, myself, was born in Australia but lived for almost 40 years in foreign countries: I never seriously considered obtaining citizenship in these countries, although I qualified in two of them, because Australian law would have canceled my Australian citizenship. Despite being physically absent for four decades, I had no intention of psychologically detaching myself from Australia via naturalization in another country. In the early stages of post second world war immigration, many Latvians in Australia were unwilling to take the decisive, apparently final step in detaching themselves from the homeland represented by becoming naturalized. Although by 1966, the proportion of Latvians who had obtained Australian citizenship was over 90%, their average length of stay before naturalization was very high in comparison with other nationalities (Kunz, 1971). Furthermore, as Putniòð (1974) showed, Latvian in Australia achieved low levels of internal assimilation (i.e., of acceptance of Australian ways of thinking about the world as right and natural).


posted by Lloyd at 4:48 AM