Post-Soviet collapse produced mass ethnic reshuffling across Europe, not the predicted flood

Evidence

Refugees and asylum seekers from Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East became a main type of population inflow to Western Europe. Their annual number increased from 116,000 in 1981 to 695,000 in 1992, with nearly two thirds going to Germany (OECD, 1995). A migration panic gripped Western Europe in the early 1990s: following the collapse of the Soviet bloc, influxes of up to 50 million East-West migrants were predicted. Indeed, a general reshuffle of ethnic groups in Central and Eastern Europe did take place. Aussiedlery persons of German descent from Eastern European countries, moved to Germany, where they had a right to entry and citizenship. Jews left the former Soviet Union for Israel and the USA. There were movements of ethnic Greeks from Albania to Greece, of ethnic Poles from Russia to Poland, of Muslim Bulgarians to Turkey and so on. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3865

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the prediction-vs-reality theme in migration panics and moral panic literature (Cohen’s moral panic framework).
• SEED: An essay angle: how a predicted catastrophe that never happened still permanently reshaped policy — the ‘human floods’ that never came drove Schengen and tightened borders.