We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 September 2022
They had no work in Sanok, neither him, nor her. And the situation simply forced them to migrate. (Aleksandra, explaining why her sisterin-law's family went to England) (Sanok, 2008)
Chapters Two and Three looked at the economic push factors that help explain migration from contemporary Poland. However, decisions to migrate are also influenced by non-economic factors in the sending locality, such as the climate of opinion regarding migration. This climate of opinion can be conceptualised as a ‘migration culture’. As defined in Chapter One, migration cultures are conventions about why and how people should migrate, which people should migrate and where they should go, as well as views about whether or not migration is a normal and sensible way of making a living, and about the costs and benefits of migration for the whole local community. By knowing the migration culture one can better understand decisions that may seem irrational from a strictly financial point of view. For example, one interviewee's husband was unemployed in Grajewo but reluctant to work in Germany, despite the efforts of the local job centre to help in this regard. He was still hoping for an American visa even though he had already been refused one six times. He stated bluntly, “In the west of Poland they go to Germany, here in the east we go to the USA.”
The examples of migration cultures in this chapter and Chapter Five are drawn primarily from Grajewo and Sanok, but this does not imply that the towns are identical, still less that they are typical of all of Poland. Elrick argues that ‘it is preferable to speak of “cultures” of migration, which evolve in different geographical contexts, and not just a single, national “culture” of migration’. Clearly, different Polish localities have different cultures, as illustrated by the case studies in Elrick's article, where one village had a long tradition of international migration and the other did not. Nonetheless, there is no reason to suppose that Sanok and Grajewo are untypical of other Polish places where migration has become a way of life, and their migration cultures do have common features linked to the high incidence of migration.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
