Where have all our migrants gone? Eastern Europe wants them back.

Much ado was made in Paris several years ago about the symbolic "Polish plumber" who was coming to steal jobs from les français. Now, it's Eastern Europeans who are lamenting the loss of not only plumbers, but all service workers.

"If you want some repairs in your apartment, you can't find anyone," says Rita Stankeviciute, a sportswriter in Vilnius, Lithuania's capital. "It's ridiculous. Lines in the grocery stores are longer. When I used to need a taxi, it was always three minutes. Now it's 'In an hour.'"

As Western Europeans fret about a new wave of Eastern Europeans flooding their countries – this time from Romania and Bulgaria, the EU's newest members – those nations have an opposite concern: how to bring those immigrants home.

For a small country like Lithuania, with a low birthrate but high rates of immigration, alcoholism, and suicide, the situation is particularly urgent. The former communist nation of 4 million has seen at least 400,000 people migrate west, whether to work construction in Dublin, pick strawberries in southern Spain, or conduct research in Scandinavia.

"We must invite them back," says Zilvinas Beliauskas, director of the government- supported Returning Lithuanian Information Center. "We should consider them an integral part of the nation."

Agencies such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) have also joined the repatriation movement. IOM's Vilnius branch recently unveiled its Lithuanian-language "Independent Migration Information Center" website to separate fact from fiction for both Lithuanians contemplating migration abroad and those mulling a return home.

It's the first such IOM site among new EU members, says Audra Sipaviciene, who heads the Vilnius office.

"If a migrant's been gone for five years, sometimes they're very pessimistic about the job situation back home, that 'Oh, nothing's changed,' " says Ms. Sipaviciene. "But it is very different. So if there's good information, all in one place, perhaps they'll return."

Deimante Doksaite, a young Lithuanian journalist who recently cofounded Lietuviams.com to keep the diaspora connected with home, had a slightly different goal: show compassion.

"Immigration is the issue everyone here talks about," says Ms. Doksaite. Yet migrants "don't get enough attention from Lithuania, so we wanted to ... let them know someone here cares. And this is the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to do it."

In a region where seemingly everyone has a sibling or neighbor working in the West, similar websites have also sprouted for Poles, Latvians, and Russians.

Economic migration westward, both legal and illegal, has been a constant since the Berlin Wall crumbled 17 years ago. Some politicians in the economically ravaged East have been reluctant to stem the tide. The billions of dollars of remittances sent home annually to the region have been a boon, and the exodus has eased pressure to produce decent-paying jobs quickly. In fact, the migrants have allowed states to project, somewhat misleadingly, the image of having effectively tackled unemployment:In July, the EU said Estonia and Lithuania had recorded the largest drops in unemployment among all EU members.

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