Only from May of last year to October of this year, 14,000 Latvians have been registered as officially employed in Ireland, and 19,000 in the UK. However, if we are to believe the calculations of the Latvian Embassy in Ireland, in reality there may be as many as 40,000 Latvian residents in that country. From this we can conclude that the official number (about 34,000 in both countries combined) can safely be multiplied by three.
As the publication notes, while Latvians are leaving Latvia en masse, representatives of other nationalities, mainly non-citizens, are unable to leave anywhere and remain. "Latvia's sluggishness on the issue of non-citizens threatens to turn into an even more complex problem," the newspaper draws attention. "If the Saeima and the government had not listened to the 'Fatherland supporters' (the association 'For Fatherland and Freedom/Latvian National Independence Movement') and had eased the naturalization process several years ago, Latvia would be much more Latvian today. The decision to slow down the granting of citizen passports to non-citizens is one of the most anti-Latvian sabotage acts that followed the restoration of independence."
The newspaper recalls that since 2004, a Latvian citizen's passport is also an EU citizen's passport, and dissatisfied representatives of minorities, if they had citizen passports, would long ago have ended up in Ireland or the UK along with Latvians and Poles. "But a non-citizen passport means that a visa is required to enter the UK," the publication explains, "which means that at a time when Latvians (citizens) are leaving en masse (in some areas already 7% of the population is abroad), foreigners (non-citizens) cannot go anywhere and remain in Latvia." According to the newspaper's forecasts, the consequences of such a state policy towards non-citizens will be a proportional increase in their number, especially in the cities of Latgale: "Citizens earn in Dublin, while non-citizens remain in Daugavpils. In fact, the consequence of the 'Fatherland supporters' policy is the Russification of Latvia. Due to migration, the number of Latvians is decreasing, while Russian-speakers stay in place, and their proportional number grows."