Emigration of Poles to the United Kingdom: history, present state and future prospects

Abstract

The history of Polish immigration within the United Kingdom is several centuries old. Yet never in its history was such a mass migration as that after the Polish accession to the EU in 2004. During the over ten years that followed, almost a million Poles chose to settle in the United Kingdom. This article reviews and analyses past and present Polish emigration to the United Kingdom. It provides answers to questions regarding who the Polish immigrants are, what work they perform and how they have integrated within British society. It also considers the factors that have influenced the future dynamics of migration from Poland. Based on these, we have formed the hypothesis that while the years of 2004‐2016 saw, statistically, the largest emigration from Poland to the United Kingdom in recorded history, in the future, the number of Polish expatriates living in the United Kingdom will drop or at least the number of newcomers will decrease.

Influences of origin and destination on migrant fertility in Europe

“…The UK has a longer history as an immigration country in general, but also as a centre of the polarization of European migrants. While Poles originally settled in UK after the Second World War (Trevena, 2009, Mąkosa, 2018, it was upon the European Union's enlargement that Polish and Romanian people massively migrated to the UK, constituting one of the largest migration movements in contemporary Europe (Burrell, 2016). Today, Poles and Romanians are ranked the second and fourth largest overseas-born populations in the UK and make up 818,000 (of whom 55% are women) and 427,000 (of whom 47% are women) of the UK population, respectively (see ons.gov.uk).…”

“…The first aimed to offer a general picture of the fertility of migrants in the two destination countries, compared to nonmigrants in the country of destination and stayers in the country of origin. Three models were estimated: Model 1 estimated the difference in the predicted number of children of migrants with respect to both nonmigrants at destination and stayers at origin, controlling only for the year of the survey; Model 2 also included educational attainment to control for one of the main sources of selectivity of migrants according to observed characteristics and finally Model 3 controlled for the employment condition, to analyse whether the gap between migrants and nonmigrants at destination depends on their different inclusion in the labour market and in the occupational hierarchy(Ballarino & Panichella, 2015, 2018.…”

The labor market participation of recently-arrived immigrant women in Germany

“…However, outside studies on ethnic Germans, Polish immigrants have not been prominently featured in the quantitative literature (several qualitative studies on seasonal migration patterns include Glorius 2008; Kepińska 2013 from White's 2016 literature overview). This contrasts with other EU countries, like the UK and Ireland, where Polish immigrants have received much more academic attention (both quantitative and qualitative, for example Drinkwater, Eade & Garapich 2009;Filimonau & Mika 2019;Krings et al 2013;Mąkosa 2018). Thus, our analysis will provide some empirical findings on the experiences of a more recent cohort of female immigrants from Poland, contextualised by the experiences of a well-researched group in Germany, Turkish women.…”