Poles Apart: How Each EU Country Gets the Migrant Workers it Requires

Abstract

In our comparative study of migrants’ motives and activities, it came as a surprise to us to find that Polish citizens travelling to work in Germany, the UK, Italy and Greece were in many ways as different from each other as they were from the other groups (Albanians in Italy and Greece, Turks in the UK) with whom we were comparing them. It was not just that they chose different jobs, or different ways of entering the countries, or different strategies of survival. They seemed to be drawn from different segments of the Polish population, and to select their destinations on the basis of a well-informed choice of the EU state most likely to welcome their skills, attitudes and lifestyle patterns. In other words, there were, it seemed, in some sense ‘British Poles’, ‘German Poles’, ‘Greek’ and ‘Italian Poles’, self-selected for the particular legal and irregular tasks available in their countries of destination.