In Parts of Europe, Migrant Workers Head Home
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Four years after Polish graphic designer Chris Rychter headed to Britain to find work and study as a citizen of the European Union, he and his wife have returned home.
Part of a swelling tide of migration back east, they are having a house built in a suburb of the Polish capital.
“It took me just three days to find a job back in Warsaw,” Rychter, 27, told Reuters. “We never saw Britain as home. . . . We went for the adventure and to get some professional experience.”
Their move highlights strong economic growth in the new EU member states and an accelerating slowdown in Britain—but also how quickly a pragmatic younger European generation has adapted to working in the 21st-century globalised economy.
Rychter’s wife Sabina has brought her job with a British-based credit insurance company with her.
“You could say I am tele-commuting,” she said. “In today’s world, with computers and mobile phones, my presence in head office is not required as before. I can sit here in Warsaw and have the flexibility to do my job irrespective of time zones.”
Helped by cheap travel as flights between Warsaw and London grew almost tenfold since Poland joined the EU in 2004, the Rychters show how Europe has shrunk and that—contrary to a popular view—migrant flows are not all one-way.
Economists now see a turnstile or pendulum effect of people moving between countries after quite short stints, in search of better conditions.
Statistics on migration within the 27-nation EU are not precise, but around half of an estimated one million people from eastern Europe who moved to Britain since 2004 have already returned home, according to a recent report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a British think-tank.
Work applications from the eight east European countries that joined the EU in 2004 were down 13 percent in the January to March period from last year, British government data show.
For many eastern European migrants, recent currency market trends favour a return, and Poland’s government wants people back to help plug labour gaps that are stoking wage inflation at a time of fast rising food and fuel prices.
EASTERN PROMISE
The trend is also positive for the wider Polish economy. Warsaw real estate broker Malgorzata Czerwinska said around 20 percent of the apartments she sells now go to such returnees, who generally pay cash with savings made abroad.
Only Britain, Ireland and Sweden opened their job markets to the easterners in 2004: other older member states have slowly followed and France will open its labour market in July.
Poland, with 38 million people, is by far the largest of the 2004 eastern entrants. Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007.
Economic factors are the main lure bringing Poles home.
“The Polish zloty has appreciated by about 40 percent against the British pound since 2004, so people should be heading back,” said Michael Dembinski, head of policy at the British-Polish Chamber of Commerce in Warsaw.
“Given the cost-of-living differential between the two countries it makes little sense to be an economic migrant now in the U.K.,” he said.
The zloty is also up 30 percent against the euro since 2004.
Poles saving up to send money home find their hard-earned cash doesn’t go as far as in the past.
Poland’s economy grew by 6.1 percent in the first quarter of 2008, Slovakia’s by 8.7 percent and the Czech Republic’s by 5.4 percent. Britain, battered by a global credit crunch and tumbling house prices, is expected to grow by just 1.8 percent in 2008.
Also, many east Europeans in Britain and Ireland have been employed in construction and related sectors which have been particularly hard hit by the economic slowdown.
Increasing the appeal of home, wages in eastern Europe have soared: Polish corporate sector wages were up 12.6 percent in April from a year before, partly because of tighter supply due to migration.
East Europeans can still earn much more in a mature economy such as Britain than they can back home, but that advantage fades when the higher cost of living in Britain is considered.
“I went to London hoping to save up some money. I had a great time but never managed to save a penny,” said Marcin Kikut, 27, who now teaches English in Warsaw after returning from London a few months ago.
“When I got back to Warsaw I was offered three jobs almost straight away. But it is perhaps not so easy to find work in some smaller towns. I have a Polish friend still in London who wants to return but is scared he won’t find a job here.”
Many Poles left for Britain when unemployment in Poland ran at about 20 percent. It is now 10.5 percent.
STAY OR GO
But cultural and personal factors also weigh. In Edinburgh, Tomek, a night-club bouncer who declined to give his surname to protect his reputation when he returns, said he plans to go back soon: “I will always be an alien here (in Britain). I like my world. It is poorer but it is mine.
“I can’t say it is bad here, but I can have the same standard of living in Poland.”
Like other east Europeans, Poles complain of having to do menial jobs in the West far below their abilities or education.
“I will never regret my year in London . . . but (from a career point of view) it was a waste of time,” said Miroslava Mozolova, 25, a Slovak who toiled in sandwich chain Pret-a-Manger but is now a quality coordinator at a budget airline in Bratislava.
Despite such complaints and the shifting economic balances, plenty of other east Europeans in Britain plan to stay put, at least for now. Many have married local people, bought property and have good jobs they don’t want to give up.
Joanna Majkrzak runs a pub in Edinburgh, near to four Polish shops, with her Irish partner.
“I think those who came here strictly for the money are now gone,” she said. “They left their families in Poland and now they have been reunited. But many Poles stay and get promoted. They become pub managers or managers of cleaning businesses.”
Dembinski of the British-Polish Chamber of Commerce said certain groups such as entrepreneurs and doctors were especially unlikely to return: “It is still much easier to set up a business in Britain than in Poland, where red tape is still very bad. It is also easier to pay tax, to hire and fire.”
Highly skilled professionals such as doctors can still earn around six times more in Britain than in Poland, he added.
TURNSTILES
Unfortunately for Britons who have grown accustomed to being able to find affordable good Polish plumbers, Slovak nannies or Lithuanian car mechanics over the past few years, east Europeans have far more options now than in 2004.
The few EU states still restricting workers from the 2004 entrants, such as Germany, will have to open up fully by 2011. Some non-EU countries such as Norway, also battling labour shortages, have already opened up to east European workers.
Poland’s business newspaper Parkiet recently quoted the head of a local consulting company as saying many Poles leaving Britain were in fact heading to Norway, not Poland, because salaries were twice as high there as in Britain.
Dembinski noted that the 700 or so weekly flights between Poland and Britain were generally full in both directions.
“Around 29,000 Poles registered for work in Britain in the first quarter of 2008. That is down 17 percent from the previous year but still adds up to more than 100,000 people over the year, though many will not necessarily stay long,” he said.
Some “commute” across borders, juggling two jobs.
“You can fly from Warsaw to, say, Nottingham with a low-cost airline in less time than it takes to drive 350 km (200 miles) to Gdansk,” noted one Warsaw-based EU diplomat.
“A few people find it worth their while financially to work part of the week in one place and the rest back at home.”
(Posted on June 18, 2008)
Comments
“Half of all Poles who moved to UK since 2004 have gone home.”
That’s good, really, because their home country, being not as prosperous as the UK won’t have many third world parasites with their hands out, and because of it they’ll have a better country to live in.
The UK and the US are going down the tubes, and won’t be fit to live in in about 20 years, if we make it that far without erupting into violence.
Posted by ice at 8:37 PM on June 18
If only half of all the blacks and muslems would leave Britain too.
Posted by at 8:57 PM on June 18
Yes, most of these people come for money only. When they get through using a country, they head on home. Meanwhile, the natives had the joy of having to spend their tax dollars on their medical care, social problems etc. One good thing about a depression here, the mexicans will be heading home, some already are. Any chance the wealthy mexican government will spend on the trillions we’ve spent on their citizens? Not holding my breath.
Posted by kc at 9:19 PM on June 18
meant to say any chance the mexican government will reimburse the US….
Posted by kc at 9:21 PM on June 18
I’m not surprised.
Britain is not only a very expensive place to live (currently the Polish economy is growing very fast),many locations eg London are distinctly unpleasant and violent, with Whites in a clear minority and with a most appalling crime problem.
Posted by Kenelm Digby at 6:29 AM on June 19
I wonder just who is leaving? It looks like mostly hard working, white Eastern Europeans. I bet the North Africans, Blacks, and Roma are all staying.
I remember seeing on British television an African man being deported by airplane. The man was out-of-control, both screaming and crying. As I recall, he even bit one of the men putting him on the plane to return to Africa. You would have thought he was being sent straight to hell, and in a sense I guess he was.
Posted by Sardonicus at 7:56 AM on June 19
Sardonicus’s description of that African deportee’s behavior explains exactly why the US INS frequently drugs deportees; it keeps them calm during their return home.
Posted by Michael C. Scott at 2:00 PM on June 19
This is win-win.
The Poles made their money and left to build a better life in their home country. The host nations got their labor.
If we’re going to have ‘quest workers’, this is how it should be made to work. Anything else is a lie and a farce.
Posted by sbuffalonative at 6:14 PM on June 19
The Poles are very nationalistic & quite rightly want to preserve their centuries-old culture & identity. Their leaders show some independence of mind & are not yet fully brainwashed stooges of the EU[SSR]. A Channel 4 TV documentary about immigration to the UK paid a visit to Poland & visited the shipbuilding city of Gdansk where the jobs in the yards had been taken up not by migrants from other parts of the EU … but by contract guest-workers from Thailand & Korea. The Polish government is keen to woo back Polish workers from abroad.
The current hero of anti-EU superstate nationalists is Czech President Vaclav Klaus whose blunt honesty has set the EU elitist politicians back on their heels with his backing of the Irish ‘No’ vote to the Lisbon Treaty & his forthright insistence that there is nothing to be discussed, the Lisbon Treaty is dead & to pursue it further is undemocratic.
This brilliant honest man of the people & his Czech colleagues are like a breathe of fresh air compared to the neo-Marxist EU elitists who are conditioned to always having their own way & their reaction of shocked disbelief is similar to that of Mr. Bumble when Oliver Twist asked for more gruel. How they must curse him in private, though they mutter about ‘more time to think on the matter’ in public.
Isn’t it amazing how simple politics becomes when the leaders of a country listen to the ordinary people & do not have their own separate agenda like the political pygmies here in the UK.
Posted by at 7:31 PM on June 19
The last time I was in Ireland, some two years ago, I noticed that nearly all of the service workers around Dublin and in smaller cities were Eastern European. I am returning next week and look forward to seeing if this is, in fact, true. I will also be in England for a week but I find it hard to make out such differences there as the whole country is already such a third world paradise.
Posted by at 9:24 PM on June 19
If you want to see what Poland—a largely Catholic country, but one that Martin Luther would be proud of for its populist agenda—is up to, please read about “Radio Maryja,” the conservative Polish radio show, that was singled out for special condemnation a few days ago by none other than the US Department of State in its new report on global anti-youknowwhatitism.
Here is Wikipedia about Radio Maryja:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Maryja
Here is the report on anti-shemitism:
http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/102301.pdf
(It’s a large file but well worth downloading so you can see why Poland—which, alone among western europe has freedom of speech—is a major target of the anti-white racist corn-spiracy)
And there you have it!
Posted by John Dougherty at 3:28 AM on June 20
this is good news. Poles: return to poland and make it a better place, minimize foreign influence, create an economic network primarily amongst yourselves, perhaps secondari1y among your fellow europeans. Learn to live simply, to do without the luxuries that many europeans cannot do without. rebuild polish agriculture, the family farm, have large families. Free yourself from slavery to status symbols. Be proud of being an honest middle class farmer or shopkeeper. Put your trust in Christ, and respect the integrity of your fellow european nations.
Posted by Artorius at 11:06 PM on June 30