Polish Migration and Enterprise in the European Union: Between the Old and the New

Abstract

The chapter presents a critical review of the academic and institutional research on migration and emergent enterprise among migrants from Poland and the other seven eastern and central European states which formalised their membership of the European Union in June 2004. These countries are sometimes referred to as the European Union Accession 8 (A8) states and consist of Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Bulgaria and Romania were admitted to the European Union in January 2007. The migrant flow from the A8 countries, primarily Poland, made up the second largest wave of migration to the United Kingdom since the French Huguenots in the sixteenth century and was significantly higher than immigration from the New Commonwealth countries during the 1950s and 1960s. A8 migrants provided a significant new source of labour for the United Kingdom before the recession. What is less clear, however, is the extent to which and they ways in which they are incorporated in the small enterprise sector and ethnic economies. This chapter identifies change and continuity in the incorporation of ‘old’ and ‘new’ migrant groups in the United Kingdom. As with New Commonwealth migration in the United Kingdom and Turkish guest-workers in Germany, Polish migrants were very much seen in instrumental terms as a labour market response to shortages in the workforce.