Migrations from Poland after 1 May 2004 with Special Focus on British Isles

Abstract

The enlargement of the European Union (EU) of 2004 was a major watershed in the post-1989 migration patterns of Polish workers, mainly for the sake of opening the new labour markets within the EU. Thus, the paper is going to answer the questions concerning the possible changes and continuities in the international migrations from Poland; the decisive factors while choosing the destination; and the factors facilitating the entry to a given sector of the foreign labour market. The paper gravitates around the concept of post-accession migration strategies as hidden behind the statistics of both sending and receiving countries: public statistical data sources (statistical offices and administrative data) and research institutions. Herewith, the paper identifies five post-accession migration strategies as hidden behind statistics: sectoral strategy and ‘Polish migration dense sectors’, strategy of delayed spatial dispersion, strategy of latent depreciation of skills, ‘greedy for work strategy’, family strategy.

Keywords

• post-accession migration
• migration strategy
• new immigration country
• spatial dispersion
• depreciation of skills