The impact of migration from and to Poland since EU accession
4. Migration from and return to Poland 1 migration from Poland
Over the last two hundred years, migration has been central to the social history of Poland, including areas lying outside today’s borders. Poland has an identity as an ‘emigration country’, where migration is ‘surrounded by myths, symbols, cultural codes and stereotyped framings’ (Garapich 2014, 284). On the one hand, political exiles of the nineteenth century, post-Second World War refugees from communism, Jewish intellectuals expelled in 1968 and the highly educated two-million strong ‘Solidarity’
emigration of the 1980s have created a tradition of elite exile that makes it easy to understand framings of the post-2004 wave of highly educated Poles to the United Kingdom and Ireland as a tragic brain drain. On the other hand, Babiński and Praszałowicz (2016, 98) argue that ‘migration has become inscribed in Polish tradition as a popular, rational and effec-tive livelihood strategy’. Poles have worked temporarily in Germany since the early nineteenth century (Nowosielski 2012, 4). Christians and Jews from partitioned Poland constituted approximately 3.5 million of the wave of European labour migrants4 to North America in the five decades before the First World War; a further two million economic migrants left Poland between the world wars. The communist regime, more ineffec-tual and somewhat more liberal than its neighbours in the Soviet bloc, allowed migration to continue, giving permission for Poles with US con-nections to go to the United States and, from the 1970s, turning a blind eye to ‘tourists’ travelling to western Europe to engage in illegal trade and temporary work on a remarkable scale (Stola 2010). Between 1.4 and 2.2 million illegal work trips abroad occurred in 1983–8 (Stola 2016, 94).
In the 1990s, migration of highly skilled people and migration for settlement reduced. In Warsaw, however, ‘migration’ consisted largely of professional people on short work-related trips (Jaźwińska, Łukowski and Okólski 1997, 51).5 Young Poles also began to settle, partly for lifestyle reasons, in cities such as London (Garapich 2016c), to some extent simi-lar to West European adventure-seeking ‘Eurostars’ (Favell and Recchi 2011). However, circular and temporary labour migration to Germany, Belgium, Italy and other continental European countries predominated (Kaczmarczyk 2005). Okólski (2001) coined the term ‘incomplete migra-tion’ for migrants who earned a living abroad but ‘lived’ in Poland, where their families remained and to which they frequently returned. This term referred to all types of movement that, due to their nature (short-term,
THE IMPACT OF MIGRATION ON POLAND 18
circular and often irregular), easily escaped statistical systems developed to trace and describe settlement-type migration. In structural terms, incomplete migration stemmed from communist-era underdevelopment and under-urbanisation: many factory workers lived in small towns and villages, but commuted to work in cities on state-subsidised transport.
After 1989, factories closed, and commuting became more expensive, so international migration began to seem a better livelihood strategy. Incom-plete migrants typically were men with vocational education from peripheral regions in eastern Poland or Silesia (Okólski 2001, 2004; Kacz-marczyk 2005).
Poland’s EU accession opened doors to better work, at lower per-sonal cost, and to combining work and travel for adventure. The labour market was buoyant in countries such as the United Kingdom and Ire-land, wages were higher than in PoIre-land, and there was a wave of popu-lar enthusiasm to experience a short spell of life abroad. Around EU accession, many migrants were young people with open-ended plans who set off with their friends and siblings. That ‘nearly one in ten people in their late twenties left Poland [from May 2004 to January 2007] is probably the most conspicuous fact’ (Anacka and Okólski 2010, 155).
The following two quotations, from 2016 and 2011, give a flavour of the period. In the first, Rafał had gone from the eastern city of Lublin to the United Kingdom in 2002:
When I first went . . . a lot of graduates who didn’t have a job here in Poland were considering whether to go abroad, everyone was thinking about it. What was the point of staying in Poland without a job, it would be better to go abroad. And because I was in England, I always helped someone get work, well, I was there, so it was easier to help out my friends.
Rafał’s sense of not having other options was shared by many young peo-ple from less prosperous locations, including many small towns and vil-lages.6 Konrad, from Poznań – one of the metropolises – had a different perspective:7
[In 2005] I was finishing my studies, like lots of people were going to Ireland, to Great Britain, and, well I thought, I could try as well.
Specially that quite a lot of my friends were in Dublin. That’s why Dublin was the place to go. . . . They were like, yeah, it’s quite fun, it’s nice, you will see and learn lots of new things, so why not.
In 2004, when the United Kingdom, Ireland and Sweden opened their labour markets to new EU citizens, Britain, with its familiar culture and language, overtook Germany as the chief destination,8 a lead that nar-rowed once other EU member states lifted restrictions over the next seven years. Poles took up the ‘Europeanisation of the Polish labour market’ (Stola 2016, 95) with enthusiasm. Countries such as Ireland, Norway and Iceland, with barely any Poles before EU accession, soon found that Poles were their largest ethnic minority population. In the first post-accession years, the stock of Polish migrants temporarily abroad jumped from around 786,000 (2002) to 1 million (2004) to 2.3 mil-lion (2007) – equivalent to 6.6 per cent of the Polish population (GUS 2009, 458). In the first years after accession there was an exodus even from the largest cities (Strzelecki et al. 2015, 144), and since 2004, peo-ple have been migrating abroad from all regions in Poland (Kostrzewa and Szałtys 2013, 52).9 Flows from traditional sending regions partly reoriented themselves, particularly at first towards the United Kingdom and Ireland, and later to a wide range of European countries.
Solo-parent, ‘incomplete’ migration dropped by about 7 per cent between 2010 and 2014 (Walczak 2014, 60), as parents already abroad with their children persuaded others to follow their example (White 2017). Migrant families, especially with children at school, tended not to return to Poland, and the stream of family migration from Poland is a main reason for the rapid transformation of much open-ended and temporary migration around 2004–7 into what now appears to be migration for settle-ment (Janicka and Kaczmarczyk 2017; White 2017, 238–9).
The global economic crisis slightly reduced the stock of Poles living in western Europe, but numbers then recovered so that, by Decem-ber 2016, an estimated 2.52 million people with permanent residence in Poland had been living abroad for over three months, 2.2 million of them in the EU. By far the most popular destinations were the United Kingdom (788,000) and Germany (687,000) (GUS 2017).10
EU migration was facilitated by new communications technology and cheap transport, which helped potential migrants inform themselves about promising destinations quickly, and contributed to a sense that it would be easy to return if the migration experiment failed (White 2017).
Moreover, the emotional costs of parting were partly reduced because it had become easier to keep in touch with friends and family in Poland thanks to ‘transnational practices’ such as phoning, Skyping and visiting.
Many migrants, feeling that they had feet in two countries, began to acquire a sense of dual belonging. Typically, Poles in Poland and abroad
THE IMPACT OF MIGRATION ON POLAND 20
know Poles in multiple foreign destinations, and their networks consist of unique combinations of ties between different places. It is rarely the case today that many people from a specific place in Poland go to a single des-tination abroad.11
4.2 return to Poland
There was no permanent return wave after 1989. Some Polish émigrés experimented with return to Poland but often decided not to settle (Górny and Kolankiewicz 2002; Stola 2016, 93). No recent quantitative study exists of returnees to Poland,12 but our qualitative research13 backs up find-ings of scholars publishing circa 2010. Although return migration is diverse, one can draw a crude distinction between two categories of migrant. On the one hand is the large body of young people, often grad-uates like Rafał and Konrad, who left around 2004 even from cities, and mostly went to the United Kingdom and Ireland. They either returned to Poland, apparently permanently, or are still abroad. Another category is the many thousands of incomplete, often slightly older migrants from smaller towns and villages, who in some cases started migrating before 2004. They are more likely than highly educated migrants to return, some-times with the intention of settling, but often to continue to engage in various kinds of ‘back-and-forth’ migration (Anacka and Fihel 2013, 69;
Fihel and Grabowska-Lusińska 2014; White 2014b). For some returnees, the experience of trying to resettle in Poland persuades them that home is in the foreign country, and they engage in ‘double return’: a second return, but this time to the foreign country, for which they have begun to feel homesick (Raczyński 2015, 146; White 2014a and 2014b). Return-ees are more economically active than the general population, but most surveys show that they are also more likely to be unemployed, sometimes on purpose, if periods in Poland are rests between spells of working abroad (Grabowska 2016).
Given that ‘return’ is indefinite, it is hard to count ‘returnees’. Data collected in Poland is only a snapshot; a complete record of return to Poland would need to include surveying Poles abroad as to whether they had ever been temporary return migrants. According to survey data, 12 per cent of Poles currently resident in Poland have worked abroad for an unspecified period in the last ten years, including 27 per cent of 25–34-year-olds (Cybul-ska 2016, 1);14 another survey, in 2017, found that 22 per cent had worked abroad at some time (Kubisiak, Ganclerz and Pilichowska 2017, 20).
Like returnees to other countries, Polish migrants return home for family reasons and/or because they are homesick and/or have fulfilled
their migration plans (see, e.g. CDS 2010a, 93; Dziekońska 2012, 140;
Frelak and Reguska 2008, 3; Kostrzewa and Sałtys 2013, 74). Poland’s economic growth during the global economic crisis was not enough on its own to persuade Poles to return, particularly because, despite the crisis, Polish wages and welfare benefits still compared unfavourably with equiv-alents in most destination countries (Kaczmarczyk, Anacka and Fihel 2016, 220). Since migrants return to be at home with their friends and family, return is often to smaller places rather than to more thriving cit-ies. When, as often seems to happen, this is not sustainable economically, returnees are tempted to go back to foreign countries, where they already know their way round, rather than move to an unfamiliar Polish city, where they may not find affordable accommodation. Hence return migration from abroad currently has limited capacity to produce a re-location of the Polish workforce within Poland.15
How long returnees spend abroad affects what influence they can have in Poland. The longer migrants are away, the more knowledge they acquire of the receiving country, and the more they may improve their skills. On the other hand, their networks at home may weaken, although this is a very individual matter. Different researchers come to different conclusions about Polish return migrants’ average length of stay abroad, ranging from under six months (Dziekońska 2012, 98; Frelak and Roguska 2008) to two years (CDS 2010a, 27; Grabowska-Lusińska 2012).