UGCC priest speaks out against bringing labor migrants to Ukraine

Yustyn Boyko. Photo: UGCC Lviv Archeparchy

UGCC cleric Yustyn Boyko has spoken out against the practice of bringing labor migrants to Ukraine. He made the remarks in an interview with the YouTube channel Hovoryt Velykyi Lviv.

According to Boyko, large companies facing labor shortages caused by wartime migration of Ukrainians abroad are deliberately bringing in foreign workers. The UGCC cleric called this unfair to Ukrainians who are shedding blood at the front at the same time.

“It is not the migrants who came here who are to blame, because they were brought in by large companies. Those to blame are the ones who, through the politics of money, push out their own people in order to obtain cheap labor,” he explained.

According to him, “the problem arises when migration is not natural but artificial – when certain political problems are deliberately created and, in order to change the situation in a given country, artificially fueled flows of migrants of a completely different culture, different mentality, and different spirituality are organized. In the long term, this threatens an ideological conflict.”

Boyko expressed concern that after the end of the war and Ukraine’s reconstruction, the scale of labor migration could rise sharply. In his view, the state should already be developing migration legislation and pursuing its own policy rather than handing the initiative over to international corporations.

Among his concrete proposals, the UGCC cleric advocated giving ethnic Ukrainians priority rights to buy land and conduct business in Ukraine.

Earlier, the UOJ wrote that, according to an expert, the only way to save Ukraine is to bring in migrants.

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