Under a new proposal from Lithuania's presidential palace, migrant workers who have lived and worked in the country for two years would be legally required to leave for six months – a rule that not only risks forcing them away but could also block them from family reunification and from ever gaining permanent residency.
The following is an opinion piece by Dr. Skirmantas Bikelis, Senior research fellow at Law Institute of Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences.
How well people of different backgrounds live together is a complicated question – as complicated as society itself. Trying to sum up migrant integration and social wellbeing with a single number or percentage is not just imprecise, it can be actively misleading. Yet that is exactly what is happening in Lithuania's current immigration debate, and foreigners living here should understand what is being proposed and why.
Earlier this spring, Vilnius mayor Valdas Benkunskas made himself something of a laughing stock among experts by announcing a supposedly scientifically-proven figure. According to him, once migrants reach 10% of a city's population, this marks a "tipping point" leading to the formation of migrant ghettos – and he used this claim to argue for stricter, migrant-unfriendly measures in the capital of Lithuania, where migrants already make up that proportion of the population.
