Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration

2 Music and Black Experiences in Post-Soviet Ukraine

64 Contemporary migration patterns place Ukraine as the fourth-largest immigrant -receiving nation-state in the world, following the United States, the Russian Federation, and Germany (Mansoor and Quillin 2006, 3). In a 2005 study conducted by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division, 6,833,000 foreign-born people were residing in Ukraine, a figure that constitutes 14.7 percent of Ukraine’s population of 48 million (Ruble 2008, 5). As of 2010, migration continues to rise. According to Ukraine’sStateStatisticsCommitteedata,duringafive-monthperiodin2010, 5,304 persons emigrated from Ukraine, while 12,472 immigrated to Ukraine, leadingtoasignificantlygreaterpercentageofnon-Ukrainianresidents(State Statistics Committee 2010a).1 Blair Ruble, former director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington , D.C., which conducts research on migration in Ukraine, says this: “Ukraine is becoming more and more a society on the move. We must stop thinking about it as a post-Soviet society and begin to think about Ukraine as a contemporary mobile society that looks like other societies dealing with globalization.”2 Augmenting the influx of newcomers is the continued decrease of Ukraine’s local population. Since independence in 1991, Ukraine has lost 5 million to 7 million citizens to an economics-driven brain-drain migration of intellectuals and skilled laborers to the West. The majority of labor emigrants left Ukraine in the mid-1990s when the country’s borders opened for travel. Due to the large number of people from the country who initially moved to Western Europe, European Union visas were restricted for Ukrainians, impedingbusiness ,tourist,andpersonaltravelfromUkrainetotheEU.In2007, the Ukrainian government signed an agreement with the EU that guaranteed T W O MUSIC AND BLACK EXPERIENCES IN POST-SOVIET UKRAINE 65 Music and Black Experiences in Post-Soviet Ukr aine freer travel for Ukrainian citizens to the EU. In exchange, the Ukrainian government agreed to accept and facilitate the transit of any undocumented migrant within the boundaries of the EU who was proved to have entered from a checkpoint in Ukraine. Those found to have crossed the borders illegally from Ukraine to neighboring Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania areheld in immigrant detention centers, some financed bythe EU. According to Human Rights Watch reports, the Ukrainian state houses these people for indefinite periods of time in often deplorable conditions within these facilities before transferring them back to their country of origin (Human Rights Watch 2005, 2010). As certain factions within the Ukrainian government actively work to align Ukraine with the European Union, Ukraine is seeing the adoption of Western concepts such as guest workers (Gastarbeiter, a German term originally used since the mid-1950s to denote temporary foreign workers in Germany ) that are reflective of European migration policies and speak loudly of the pressure to categorize newcomers to Ukraine as temporary. Policy workers in Ukraine and the European Union do not consider Ukraine a country of immigrant destination but rather a stopover to Europe. The reality is that many immigrants wish to remain in Ukraine and send for their extended families. Because Ukrainian and EU officials do not appear to think about the true nature of this migration, Ukrainian society has not been prepared or willing to integrate newcomers. This has created a breadth of unreadiness in facilitating transitions for people engaging with economic, political, and social systems different from those in their home country. There is very little assistance offered toward procuring necessary paperwork and very few social programs in place that help ease anxieties for newcomers and for local populations whose suspicions of newcomers as an economic drain on social services, competition in the job market, and a potential threat to social order are evidenced in cultural, social, economic, and political marginalizations. The country’s education curriculum also does little to help newcomers integrate and obtain knowledge. In conversations with professors from the Kyiv Conservatory of Music, which has enrolled an increasing number of students from China in the last few years, such tensions are particularly evident in ethnomusicology course enrollment. Chinese students are admitted to the conservatory on a paying basis, and their tuition helps cover the costs of running the school, which was once fully funded by the Soviet state. However, their lack of fluency in Russian or Ukrainian often keeps them out of ethno- 66 Hip Hop Ukr aine musicology courses, where students are required to learn various folk repertoires . The Kyiv Conservatory’s historical focus...