Introduction

The accession of CEE countries to the European Union in 2004 had significant influence on migration processes in this geographical area. A main reason for the shift in mobility patterns was the EU policy on free movement of persons and services, which opened the labour markets of some member states, as well as the large migration potential among the ‘new Europeans’. The latter was a result of labour force surpluses and delays in economic modernisation. Undoubtedly, regardless of the size of the population, Poland represented the biggest migration potential. In the opinion of some experts one to four million people emigrated from Poland after 1 May 2004. The most credible estimation was presented by Grabowska-Lusińska and Okólski (2009), according to whom the net outflow of people was about 1.1 million between 2004 and 2006. Polish post-accession migrants preferred emigrating to countries where labour markets were open for EU citizens, like the United Kingdom and Ireland. In the case of the latter, though, it is not the numbers that are the most striking but the dynamics of the flow.

Despite the transition periods that delayed full access to some labour markets, those countries that received the largest pre-accession migration flows remained important migration destinations for Poles. These included Germany, Italy and, independent of EU policies, transcontinental migrations to the United States (see Map 14.1).

Moreover, the post-accession outflow from Poland was lower than the observed increase of the number of Poles staying abroad (Grabowska-Lusińska & Okólski 2009). One possible interpretation of this phenomenon is that the change in institutional conditions enabled legalisation of stays abroad. Therefore, we may further estimate that the number of migrants already living abroad was much larger than the post-accession outflow alone.

As migration research indicates, significant emigration waves may lead to return migration as time passes (Ravenstein 1889). distinguish three phases of return migration to Poland in the twentieth century (Slany & Małek 2002). The first phase, starting in 1938, embraced traditional return migration, which was a result of massive outflows of Poles to the United States, the so-called ‘migration for bread’ between 1918 and 1938. The next phase of returns was the homecoming of political and labour migrants during the period of socialism (1961-1989). In light of research and available statistical data, these two stages of remigration were not significant in scale, though.