Poland’s post-war dynamic of migration

Book abstract:

The trends and mechanisms of migration in Central and Eastern Europe since 1945 and in light of future EU expansion are the subject of this deep, socio-economic and political analysis. The author chooses Poland as the reference country for the whole Central European region situated as it is at the Eastern border of the 'enlarged' EU, and charts the slow but perceptible change from being a major emigrant sending country into being a country of net-immigration and transit.

The work is organised over three chapters plus an introduction and summary. The first main chapter examines the patterns of emigration from Poland between the end of the Second World War and 1999. Chapter three addresses the mechanisms and patterns of the massive cross-border mobility of citizens of the former Soviet Union that impacted on the territory of Poland. The patterns of immigration to Poland from both the East and the West are dealt with in chapter four and because of Western Europe's restrictive migration policy towards citizens of the post-Soviet countries the extent to which Poland may become 'a gateway to the West'. The nature of the labour market mix both with regard to skills and ethnicity are subject to in-depth analysis and signposts offered towards the potential and real conflicts posed by the social exclusion of immigrants.

The book will be of interest to students, scholars, researchers and policy makers in the fields of migration, nationalism, racism and ethnic relations.

Krystyna Iglicka is with The Institute for Social Studies at Warsaw University in Poland and was Fulbright Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999/2000.