The “immigration gap” in settler nations

Today, discussing the fate of the VFL’s “soccer belt” problem children in 1960s — South Melbourne, North Melbourne, Footscray and Fitzroy —one thing occurred to me whilst I was discussing with my brother and a former Penleigh friend the southern and eastern European immigration that eroded those clubs’ supporter bases. I had long presumed this post-World War II migration wave to be largely driven by migrants fleeing Stalinism, although a large proportion was from non-Stalinist Greece and Italy.

An oddity is that, whilst there was large-scale migration from:

1. the northern Stalinist nations of the Baltic States, Poland, the former Czechoslovakia, and Hungary and
   
2. the Balkan nations of the former Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania

there was, at least before Stalinism collapsed, very little or no migration from the intermediate nations of Romania and Bulgaria. My brother agreed with me on this — he knew people from Greece, Yugoslavia and the countries listed in (1), but no one of Bulgarian ancestry and only one person of Romanian ancestry. Looking at Wikipedia, although the figures are substantially distorted by migration since the collapse of Stalinism, one does see how small the Romanian and Bulgarian diasporas in Australia remain.

A similar situation prevails on the opposite shore of the Black Sea. There is virtually no (Stalinist-era or earlier) Georgian diaspora in Australia or other colonial settler nations, but large Armenian diasporas.

This interesting fact my brother suggested to be because it was easier to emigrate from Yugoslavia and Greece than from Stalinist nations more closely connected to Russia. However, as we discussed, that makes little sense because Enver Hoxha’s Albania was much harder to migrate from than Russia-allied Stalinist countries, yet still saw significant migration.

What my brother did point out was that the lack of pre-existing communities may have prevented immigration from Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia. This is  of course logical, but it does not explain how these immigrant communities developed in the first place. A quite convincing argument, more than the first two, is that Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia had more flat land and thus fewer people were pushed from the land by land reform or farm consolidation than in the Balkans or Armenia. Although they possessed even more flat land than Romania, Bulgaria or Georgia, the more northerly Stalinist nations’ peoples  established populations in the settler states during the late nineteenth century, which created opportunities for further immigration due to the existence of communities with familiar food and culture.