The promise tapped into fears among Polish citizens about demographic decline. With the fertility rate incredibly low and general resistance to immigration, the country is naturally concerned with what's going to happen to Polish industry and the welfare state a concern shared across the continent. For Poland, this worry needs to be seen in context.
Since around when Poland joined the EU and gained access to member countries' labor markets the country saw emigration of well over a million people , many to the U. To give a picture of this, in the number of Polish-born people living in the U.
By that number had risen to , This history, coupled with today's record low unemployment and labor shortages in Poland, might lead one to see a picture of emigration since as simply a bad thing.
A brain drain, perhaps. In a way they got something; they could work and they could develop and they could earn money and get new skills. And in that time our economy grew. The problem with the term "brain drain" is that it ignores the benefits brought by emigration.
As Jancewicz described in the specific case of Poland, in the early s unemployment was at record highs and many Poles had better opportunities for their own development abroad. Many of those that left gained experience and skills that might have been unavailable to them in Poland, especially lower-skilled workers another pernicious aspect of the "brain drain" idea, according to Jancewic,z is that only highly-skilled people were able to leave.
Pavel Latushka, a member of the Belarusian opposition, charged that state-controlled tourist agencies were involved in offering visa support to migrants and helping them drive to the border.
During the summer, Lithuania introduced a state of emergency to deal with an influx of migrants and strengthen its border with Belarus. It set up tent camps to accommodate the growing number of migrants. In previous months, small groups of asylum-seekers tried to sneak into Lithuania, Poland and Latvia at night, using forest paths away from populated areas.
Authorities in Warsaw estimated the crowds at about 3,, and said they prevented hundreds of people from entering the country. Poland deployed riot police and other forces to bolster the border guards. Eight deaths have been confirmed at the Belarus-Poland border,, and temperatures have fallen below freezing at night. Pavel Usau, head of the Center for Political Analysis and Prognosis based in Poland, also said Lukashenko is mistaken if he thinks he can force the EU into concessions.
For well over a century, therefore, Poland has been one of those countries that many people wanted to leave, whether to escape political oppression, war or poverty. By , almost half a million Poles lived in Chicago , and today , residents of that city identify as Polish-Americans. More recently, Poles have migrated in massive numbers to Great Britain and other EU countries, to the point where Polish is now the second-most commonly spoken language in England after English, of course.
But times have changed, and Poland is rapidly transforming from a poor country that generates emigration into a relatively wealthy country that is starting to attract immigration albeit still on a small scale. And in the midst of the worldwide recession after , Poland was the only European country whose economy continued to grow. Using those figures, it is immediately clear that Poland is not a poor country. And although the residents of Warsaw now enjoy a standard of living similar to their peers in Berlin, some parts of the country rank among the poorest regions in the entire European Union.
In fact, on a smaller scale this is already happening. About , foreigners are legally registered as immigrants in Poland, mostly from Ukraine, Belarus, Vietnam and China. That has consequences: Many Polish children grow up without parents, who are gone for months or even years at a time. Polish internet sites are full of stories from children who feel abandoned by their parents because they are working abroad.
They look for support on internet forums where they write about their fate: "Hi Dad, I'm already It has been a year since you left. Every day I smell the shirt you left behind because it didn't fit in your suitcase.
It reminds me of you," as Maria quotes from a letter she wrote to her father who is in England working as a day laborer. Tomek, an year-old, complains: "My mom went abroad when I was She said she was going to Germany for a couple of months because she made so little in Poland. She couldn't even afford to buy clothes here. She is still there. That makes me sad. When Malgorzata Greber decided to go abroad she wanted to spare her daughter such a fate. She was courageous enough to take her then 8-year-old daughter with her to England.
Nevertheless, she soon felt lonely. She missed her home, her family and friends. The experience was also not as lucrative as she had hoped financially. The only ones that manage to do well are the ones who go as couples," she tells DW. Read more: Polish nationals in Britain worry about the future. After two-and-a-half years, Greber and her daughter returned to Poland, where she resumed work as a nurse.
But that only went well for about six months.
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