The Impact of Migration on Poland
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The Impact of Migration on Poland The Impact of Migration on Poland EU Mobility and Social Change Anne White, Izabela Grabowska, Paweł Kaczmarczyk and Krystyna Slany First published in 2018 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press Text © Authors, 2018 Images © Authors, 2018 The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as authors of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: White et al. 2018. The Impact of Migration on Poland: EU Mobility and Social Change. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787350687 Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ ISBN: 978-1-78735-070-0 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-071-7 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-068-7 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-78735-067-0 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-78735-066-3 (mobi) ISBN: 978-1-78735-069-4 (html) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787350687 Acknowledgements The authors would like to express their deep gratitude to the interviewees in Poland, Norway and the United Kingdom who participated in the projects on which this book is based, as well as to everyone who sup- ported the research with practical assistance and advice. Special thanks go to our co-researchers: Michał Garapich, Ewa Jaźwińska and Agnieszka Radziwinowiczówna (Cultural Diffusion and Social Remittances); Ewelina Ciaputa, Beata Kowalska, Ewa Krzaklewska, Anna Ratecka, Beata Tobiasz- Adamczyk, Marta Warat and Barbara Woźniak (Gender Equality and Quality of Life); and Paula Pustułka, Ewa Krzaklewska, Magdalena Ślusarczyk, Justyna Struzik and Stella Strzemecka (Transfam). The projects were funded by the National Science Centre (Poland), the Polish- Norwegian Research Programme, the British Academy, the Grabowski Fund and the Polish Research Centre of the Jagiellonian University in London. Finally, we thank our families and friends for their support, patience and inspiration. v Contents List of figures ix List of tables xi 1 How are countries affected by migration? An ‘inside-out’ approach to change in sending and receiving countries 1 Anne White 2 The impact of migration from and to Poland since EU accession 10 Anne White, Izabela Grabowska, Paweł Kaczmarczyk and Krystyna Slany 3 Literature review and theory: The impact of migration on sending countries, with particular reference to Central and Eastern Europe 42 Anne White and Izabela Grabowska 4 Social remittances: Channels of diffusion 68 Izabela Grabowska 5 Post-accession migration and the Polish labour market: Expected and unexpected effects 90 Paweł Kaczmarczyk 6 Family relations and gender equality in the context of migration 108 Krystyna Slany 7 Lifestyles, livelihoods, networks and trust 131 Anne White vii 8 Culture and identity 160 Anne White 9 Polish society abroad 186 Anne White 10 The impact of migration into Poland by non-Poles 213 Anne White 11 Developing an ‘inside-out’ approach: A transnational sociology of sending countries 227 Anne White References 233 Index 267 viii ContentS List of figures Fig. 4.1 Combined set of features of an agent of change 84 Fig. 5.1 Labour market development in Poland, 2004–17 92 Fig. 5.2 Migration from Poland (stock of temporary migrants staying abroad) and Polish labour market, 2004–17 93 Fig. 5.3 Migration from Poland (stock of temporary migrants staying abroad) and selected macroeconomic variables, 2004–17 94 Fig. 5.4 Short- and medium-term effects of post-accession migration, Poland and other CEE countries, 2004–10, changes in per cent (GDP, real wages) or percentage points (unemployment rate) 98 Fig. 5.5 Students enrolled in tertiary education (ISCED 5–6) as percentage of the total population aged 20–4 103 Fig. 6.1 Contexts of social changes relating to migration and families in Poland today 115 Fig. 8.1 Share of Poles in different age groups possessing a self-declared ‘active’ knowledge of English, 2007–15 168 ix List of tables Table 2.1 Assessment of changes in Poland, 1989–2014 (selected changes) 14 Table 2.2 Correspondence between population size and selected ascending/descending social indicators, 2013–15 15 Table 2.3 The ‘main benefits of EU membership for Poland’ (answers related to migration benefits only, as percentages) 23 Table 4.1 Conceptual model of chapter 4 71 Table 4.2 Data sources for chapter 4 73 Table 4.3 Linear regression for social skills and relations with work abroad 76 Table 6.1 Main data sources for chapter 6 110 Table 7.1 Author’s research projects, used for chapters 7–10 135 Table 7.2 Percentage of Poles from different regions claiming that ‘in order to obtain a job or change their job for a better-paid one’, they would be inclined to move in Poland or abroad 154 Table 7.3 Trends discussed in chapter 7, selected types of factor contributing to each trend, and connected migration- related influences 156 Table 8.1 Percentage of Poles claiming to feel dislike (niechęć) of selected nationalities 164 xi 1 How are countries affected by migration? An ‘inside-out’ approach to change in sending and receiving countries Anne White In December 2016, Polish television broadcast an advertisement for Alle- gro, an online shopping site. The advertisement features Robert, a pen- sioner, purchasing English for Beginners and practising basic words and sentences on the tram and in the bath. Robert then travels to the United Kingdom for Christmas and greets a small mixed-race girl who comes to the door, with the words ‘Hello, I’m your grandpa.’ The video was watched by millions around the world and was the most popular Youtube film of the year in Poland, where a journalist for a leading newspaper claimed that ‘it would be hard to find a Pole who hadn’t seen it’ (Wątor 2017). The film depicted a poignantly familiar situation in a society where almost everyone has family and friends abroad. It was somehow also puzzling, given widespread stereotypes that older people are passive victims of migration and, moreover, do not learn foreign languages. This book is, as far as we know, the first with the title ‘The Impact of Migration on Country X’, and is the most ambitious attempt to date to understand how migration influences social change in a specific sending country. It is not a historical study of migration’s cumulative effect on Poland, but, as the reference to EU mobility in the subtitle suggests, an exploration of how Poland today is changing. We consider some overall economic trends, but are particularly interested in how and why Polish society is evolving and how this is, to some extent, because migration affects Poles in their everyday lives. Although we do not try to answer the question of the extent to which social change is caused by migration, 1 migration rarely seems to be the main factor. However, once one begins to investigate, it seems there are many social trends which are reinforced – or in other cases held back – as a result of migration. For example, we present figures showing that more and more retired Poles are in adult education, and that active English-language knowledge has been increasing overall in the Polish population and even in older age groups. One reason is that – as we know from our own and other research- ers’ interviews and participant observation – grandparents are indeed learning foreign languages to communicate with family members abroad. Our book is unusual, as a work of migration scholarship, for its emphasis not on migrants but on stayers – people, like Robert, who live in sending countries but who also inhabit transnational social spaces, with multiple reference points thanks to their communications with people abroad and visits to foreign countries. Moreover, Polish society has been filling up with a particularly significant type of stayer: return migrants. According to survey data, 12 per cent of Poles resident in Poland have worked abroad in the last ten years, including 27 per cent of 25–34 year olds (Cybulska 2016, 1). Social change also occurs thanks to the addition of these returnees, changing the composition of society in Poland. For example, as discussed in chapter 8, the number of Poles in Poland who know openly gay people or Muslims (neither often encountered in Poland) has considerably increased in recent years. The book identifies a number of important trends in Poland, taking into account imperfections in the data, complexities with regard to which subgroups of society are changing, and the presence of counter-trends. In each case we explore why these trends might be occurring, and consider how migration fits into this picture. The book also probes into deeper types of change: not just changing practices, but also the norms, beliefs and even values that can change as a result of those changing practices. For example, an important trend in Poland, as elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), is towards more meaningful rights for women and minorities than existed under the communist regime. Gender equality is one of these, although it has received notable setbacks in Poland recently. Nonethe- less, an accumulation of practices linked to migration do promote the underlying trend towards more equal gender roles.