[LINK] "Unsettling times for a settled population? Polish perspectives on Brexit"

[rfmcdonald]

Anne White's Open Democracy essay looks at Polish perspectives on Brexit. With such a large and well-entrenched Polish minority now in place in the United Kingdom, there's plenty of potential for sadness if there is a break.

When I was asked to write a piece about Poles and other EU citizens living in the UK and their perspectives on Brexit, my first thought was that Polish people in the UK are little different from the millions of UK citizens living or travelling to work in other EU countries, or from French, German and other western Europeans living in Britain. All have equal reason to feel horrified by the prospect of Brexit.

It has been almost twelve years since Poland and other central and east European countries joined the EU: plenty of time for freedom of movement to seem normal and taken for granted, and for individual lives to be planned on the assumption that free movement was a right which would not be retracted. In some cases, exercising the right to free movement involves commuting across international borders. In many others, EU citizens have settled and put down roots in other EU countries, roots which might not be easy to tear up. This applies equally to Poles in the UK. As a Polish mother commented to me in Bristol, “definitely we’ll be in the UK for a long, long time, because, well, it’s obvious that children can’t be continually chopping and changing”.

Insofar as Poles in the UK are different from some other groups of migrants, it is partly because there are so many young families here. This adds a particular dimension to their current predicament. The popular image of the young Polish migrant who could just as easily go back to Poland as stay in the UK was reasonably accurate in 2004, but that was twelve years ago. At the time, many had only just graduated or left school and had never been employed in Poland. Now their whole working life has been lived in the UK.

Though often starting in unskilled manual jobs, many progressed to more interesting employment or set up businesses. They learned their way around their local areas, made friends, found partners, and had families. Existing parents encouraged their spouses and children to join them in the UK. Some people expended huge energy in creating Polish organisations, such as Polish-language supplementary schools, that added to the network of institutions established by the post-1945 Polish diaspora.

Recent research into civic participation among Poles in the UK, conducted for the Warsaw-based Institute of Public Affairs, suggests that many others take part in leisure activities alongside non-Polish people living in Britain. Travelling by bus from Warsaw to Podlasie region last summer, I happened to sit next to a post-accession migrant (like myself, on holiday in Poland) who entertained us during the ride by showing me her photos of walking holidays in the Peak district and mid-Wales.