Polish Migration after the Fall of the Iron Curtain

Abstract

Poland has been an emigration country for more than a century. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the enlargement of the European Union in 2004, coupled with unrestricted entry to the United Kingdom, Sweden and Ireland, caused one of the biggest emigration flows in Poland’s postwar history. On November 19, 2006, the New York Times reported that 800,000 Poles left the country since Poland joined the EU. The number of Polish residents who stayed abroad for at least two months tripled between early 2004 and early 2007 from approximately 180,000 to 540,000 (Kaczmarczyk and Ok olski, 2008). In May 2011, Germany opened its doors fully to jobseekers from Poland paving the way for a flood of cut-price carpenters, plumbers and other budget labour of the kind that swept Britain in 2004 (Hall et al., 2011). Norway and Belgium have also become destinations for post-accession Polish migrants (Mostowska, 2012, 2013). With this exodus Poland became one of the largest exporters of labour within the enlarged European Union. According to the 2011 Polish Census, 2,06 million Poles have resided abroad for at least three months, including 1,6 million who lived outside Poland for longer than 12 months (GUS, 2012). While the scale of Polish migration has remained on the rise, Polish permanent emigration has been steadily decreasing, giving ways to new migration patterns. The fairly stable migration flows that marked the post-WWII period have dissolved into more complex, transitory patterns in terms of temporary settlement and shifting migration status (Engbersen, Van der Leun and de Boom, 2007). Polish migration no longer takes the form of unidirectional movement from country of origin to destination country that ends with permanent settlement. Post-enlargement migratory movements from Poland have become much more differentiated and have led to a more diverse and floating populations (Danilewicz, 2010; Urba nska 2009). Paraphrasing Bauman’s (2000, 2005) work on “liquid modernity”, Polish international migration has become “liquid”. Polish migrants, who for decades regarded the United States as the “promised land”, shifted their focus to Western Europe, much more geographically accessible. Polish migration took a form of ‘pendulum’ or ‘circular’ migration and in some cases transnational commuting. These movements have been governed by the ebb and flow of economic demands and the state of labour markets at home and abroad (Favell, 2008; Mostowska, 2013). The current issue of International Migration presents a collection of articles, many penned by Polish migration scholars, on a wide variety of issues with important migration policy ramifications. The collection opens with an article by Isa nski et al. based on an online survey of post-accession Polish migrants who use their spatial mobility to adapt to the new context of post-communist space and EU enlargement in order to enhance their professional qualifications and pursue educational goals. Rather than relying on transnational networking for improving their condition in the country of settlement, many Poles tend to settle within mobility, staying mobile as long as they can in order to improve or maintain a particular quality of life. Their experience of migration becomes their lifestyle, their leaving home and going away, paradoxically, a strategy of staying at home, and, thus, an alternative to what international migration is usually considered to be: emigration or immigration. This does not mean that some Polish migrants do not “extend their stay abroad” and decide to settle outside Poland (McGhee, 2013; Ryan et al., 2009; Ryan and Sales, 2013).