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Cultural Migration in Autobiography Grundtvig Partnerships 2009-2011

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

e-mail: kszia@komesnet.com.pl http://cma.internetdsl.pl

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Maria Francuz

Poland is one of the very few European countries which have little problem with mass immigration. When the continent is preoccupied with integration of immigrants to the societies and the labor market, Poland is still more worried about emigration of its own nationals.

For more than a century, Poland has been one of the largest sending areas in Central and Eastern Europe and a vast reservoir of labor for many countries in Western Europe and North America. Poland's geographical and political location predestined it to struggle amidst the interplay between the West and the East, in both historical and cultural perspectives as well as economic and social contexts.

Before 1989 immigration to Poland was very limited for political reasons, quite the opposite to emigration. The change occurred in 1989, for various reasons. The most important was lifting of the constrictions to movement in Eastern Europe. The open borders encouraged a vastly spread cross-border trade exchanges. Most notably, the changes also caused the first inflow of asylum seekers. In the late 1990’s, the situation was stabilized and Poland became a destination for three types of immigrants: asylum seekers, economic migrants and repatriates (ethnic Poles using the framework of Polish repatriation policy). Source: http://www.migrationeducation.org

Large numbers of recognized refugees come from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Somalia, Belarus, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq and Chechenia. Most of the economic migrants come from Poland's Eastern European neighbors and Asia: Ukraine, Belarus, Vietnam and Armenia. Russian and Moldovan nationals belong to the stable core as well.

But Poland has a small immigrant population, yet. According to the data of Office for Foreigners, in 2009 in Poland were about 92,574 legal migrants. There is 0.24 percent of the whole population, only.

Therefore, in this project we decided to focus especially on the repatriates autobiographies. This is our specific and special value in this project.