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Poland's migration: growing diversity of flows and people
Okolski, Marek |
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All flows of migrants either from or to Poland, may turn out to be very moderate, echoing the experience of other transitional countries, where, according to predictions millions of citizens were expected to storm the borders of the West, when in reality there were tens or at most hundreds of thousands of migrants, observe the authors of this survey. .
While emigration from Poland has been happening for some time, immigration, consisting almost exclusively of returning Poles, has never been of a significant scale. From 1945 until the late 1980s population movements to and from Poland were rigidly controlled by the state. The 1980s saw the revitalisation of old and the establishment of new networks of international migration. Since 1989 regulation concerning international movements of people have been modified, extended and made less arbitrary and the present laws are liberal and in accordance with major international conventions. The opening up of borders and restoration of the freedom of travel and the creation of business and employment opportunities in Poland were of crucial importance in the transformation of migration trends in the 1990s. Poland’s participation in European networks and institutions dealing with migration matters has prompted Poland to modernise her border control infrastructure and to increase the numbers of better trained border guards. From 1993 the situation with respect to illegal transit migration through Poland underwent a radical shift with the introduction of more severe asylum regulations in Germany and the tightening of control on Poland’s borders led to a significant reduction in the number of foreign nationals being apprehended. A mass circulation of people claiming to be tourists, but solely engaged in petty trade, were in fact pioneers of a new form of mobility called incomplete migration Sooner or later Poland will have to deal with the presence of undocumented but settled migrants. For Poles this form of emigration of undocumented Poles is related to employment in a foreign country, mainly in the lower sections of the labour market. The paper categorises people coming to Poland into 5 major categories, re-immigrants, immigrating non-Polish citizens, documented migrant workers, foreigners engaged in incomplete migration and illegal migrants. |
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