Authors

Anne White¹;  ¹ UCL SSEES, UK

Discussion

The paper will be based on my 2019-25 research projects investigating how Poland’s transition to becoming a ‘country of immigration’ is experienced by Poles and foreigners outside Poland’s big cities. In this paper, I consider the opinions and attitudes of Polish returnees living in five such towns and smaller cities: the assumptions they made about migration to Poland; the extent to which they were aware of the presence of foreigners in their home location; and the ways in which they either identified with, or ‘othered’, economic migrants from other countries.  
         The towns and cities were socially stratified. Poles who worked in factories alongside foreigners were conscious of the scale and diversity of migration, including the increasing presence of people from around the globe. Other Poles, particularly in white-collar jobs, were only aware of Ukrainians. When talking about their own experiences of living in countries like the UK and Germany, the interviewees displayed a range of attitudes towards ethnic diversity, as also indicated in other research (e.g. Gawlewicz 2015, Garapich 2016, White et al 2018). However, when reflecting on migrants coming to Poland they drew many parallels with their own experiences. They applied dual labour market theory (Piore 1979), explaining how – just as in western Europe – some jobs in Poland had become spurned by local people so that gaps in this secondary part of the labour market were filled by migrants. They recognised that Ukrainians were arriving in Poland as a wave, and they knew how it felt to be part of such an exodus. They could see a pattern in how Ukrainians were now spreading out to smaller cities in Poland and bringing over their families, just as Poles had done in the west.
     The interviewees were keen to point out that labour migration was a completely normal and predictable social phenomenon. They focused on the fact that migrants were behaving as one would expect people to behave – migrating to work where better work was available. Unlike some politicians, the interviewees did not dwell on ethnic aspects of migration to Poland. However, the whiteness and assumed Christianity of Slav migrants in Poland possibly did influence the perceptions of a few, judging by the fact that these people also made hostile comments about Muslim migrants in western Europe.