five - Local migration cultures: opportunities and ‘pull factors’

Summary

If one person has already gone abroad, obviously a second will go, and a third, and so on in turn. (Roza, Grajewo)

He didn't have anybody he could go to in Germany, but in England he had a cousin. That's why he went to her. He didn't have any other country he could go to. (Ilona, UK)

This chapter examines whether migration is so common because people see it as something with which they can experiment. Often the attitude that migration is experimental goes hand in hand with the view of migration as an opportunity. This may seem at odds with the perception that migration is forced, but the paradox can be resolved if the concept of an opportunity which ‘cannot’ be missed is taken into account. Such opportunism is facilitated by the ease with which unpaid leave can be taken from employers, who often share local opinion that migration is worth experimenting with. Even more importantly, migration is facilitated by the huge migration networks that connect Grajewo and Sanok to Western countries, networks which offer ample evidence to support the theory that networks constitute a major cause of migration flows (see Chapter One). It is not the case that migrants simply use networks as a mechanism for migration, but rather that they are often truly a cause of migration, in the sense that migration would not have occurred without an invitation from an existing migrant. This chapter discusses some of the conventions surrounding such networks. Migrants often persuade others to join them by painting attractive pictures of migration destinations, and a further aspect of a local migration culture is the prevailing images of destination countries, images which partly determine the direction of migration flows.This chapter looks at images of the UK that help attract Polish migrants to the UK, but also at negative images of life abroad which colour perceptions of the UK.

It has been suggested that networks do not explain the current wave of migration from Eastern to Western Europe. The suddenness with which Poles adopted the UK and Ireland as migration destinations after 2004 might seem to indicate that networks were not the major determinant of these migration flows, since networks normally take time to build.