"Environmental homeless": integration of Belarusian immigrants in Granada

Abstract

This paper is part of a broader research focused on the study of the Belarusian immigration in the province of Granada. It is a qualitative and methodological research with hermeneutic aspects in order to answer to a biographical-narrative study, using the strategy “story of life” and using a biographical, semi-structured in depth interview for data gathering. The obtained results linked the difficulty for the studied group to integrate with the weakness of the cultural identity and its relation to the environmental migration due to the nuclear industry. The temporary hosting programs strengthened the inter-cultural relations between the Spanish and Belarusian people, which enabled a better understanding of cultures and values. This fostered the consolidation of a peculiar migration network, composed by native population (host families) supporting the Belarusian immigration (basically related to economic migration and “affection” or “love” migration that erased the awareness of environmental emigrant due to the development of the nuclear industry).The discussion considers the influence of the environmental factor in the immigration decision, the awareness and the determination of such circumstance on the studied group, as well as it attribution to the so called “environmental homeless”, where the detachment from their place of origin, the lack of desire to turn and the denial of Belarusian identity is observed.Knowing the Belarusian immigrant particularities led us to consider the need to elaborate a programme for promoting their cultural identity, in the framework of the Migratory Pedagogy (Absaliamova & Gorbacheva, 1997) in order to facilitate their integration process.

Keywords

• Migración (inmigración bielorrusa), migración ambiental, programas de acogida, educación intercultural, integración, Chernóbyl