A shift has taken place in how we think of migration

[Ognir]

RUADHÁN MAC CORMAIC

Sat, May 02, 2009

ANALYSIS: Post EU enlargement migration has had a permanent impact on Ireland. . . and on the central European countries from where migrants came

IT ASKS a lot of the imagination, walking the streets of cosmopolitan small-town Ireland, to see the country as it would have been had the labour market not been opened to the EU's newest citizens five years ago this week.

To picture places such as Bunclody, Co Wexford – home to more Poles than any other Irish town at the time of the last census – without their east European food shops or Lithuanian tradesmen, the brimming pews at Polish Mass on a Sunday morning, or their shop assistants from Riga reading economics textbooks under the counter. It takes a leap of a different kind to stand in Bialystok, a city near Poland's eastern border with Belarus, and listen to emigrants' parents speak of Ireland as the place of promise and possibility for the region's aspirant young. And yet we have learned to take that, too, in our stride.

So thoroughly have immigrants from central and eastern Europe inserted themselves into Ireland's everyday life, and into the country's own portrait of itself, that it can be difficult to believe how little time has passed since it all began. It wasn't that they were entirely absent before the 2004 EU enlargement round, but by 2005 the annual rate of registration among Poles had multiplied 17 times, to more than 64,000, on the 2003 figure.

Diasporas from Poland, Lithuania and Latvia have driven a demographic revolution that has reached every town and city in the country. Each week, hundreds of Polish Masses take place in Catholic churches across the country, renewing and revitalising congregations that had been flagging for years. There are now 10 Polish schools in the State, and more than 600 Polish-run companies. Five years ago, there was no direct flight between Dublin and Warsaw; today there are 107 between the two countries.

We tend to forget that this was generally unexpected. Writing in this paper in July 2002, on potential post-enlargement migration to Ireland, Minister for European Affairs Dick Roche opined: "There is no reason to believe... that large numbers of workers will wish to come."

Opposition politicians thought much the same, as did economists, trade unions and eastern European governments themselves. By the time census enumerators collected forms here in April 2006, Poles had become the second largest immigrant group, after the British, with Lithuanians in third place and Latvians in fifth. In all, according to the European Commission, some 5 per cent of the working-age population here last year originated in the EU10 – a far higher share than any other EU state.

Big European migrations are not new. The collapse of the Soviet Union precipitated the greatest peacetime upheavals since the end of the second World War, as millions of people crossed the continent's borders for political reasons – Jews moving to Israel, Russians returning to the motherland, ethnic Germans going back home.

But the post-2004 movements are different because they have been driven mainly by economics, not politics. Some people travelled to gain new experiences, meet new people and pick up languages, but most also considered temptingly higher wages, ready employment and the prospect of career advance. Workers on the production line at the Dell plant in Lodz will earn about €3 an hour – €7 less than they would have earned from the same company before it left Limerick.

If the scale of this movement of people has been remarkable, its nature has also hastened a shift in the way we think of migration. At the time of the last census, 59 per cent of married Polish men here were not living with their spouse, suggesting that many had left their families at home while they worked in Ireland.

Stories abound of east European builders who would travel to Ireland for a weekend's work and return home to Vilnius or Gdansk when the job was done, or of doctors who live in Wroclaw and work three days a week in Dublin. The internet, mobile phones and, above all, cheap air travel mean not only are migrants in closer contact with home, but that they can move easily between there and here.

The Polish government refers to the "mobility factor" rather than migration, stressing the impermanence, the fluidity and the dynamism of these movements, and the failure of traditional categories to account for what has been happening. A report by the Migration Policy Institute in Washington in 2007 argued that key immigration concepts were in need of "a major re-engineering, if not reinvention", and there is no better example than the post-2004 experience in Europe of why that might be.

What meaning do binaries such as "senders" vs "receivers" of migrants hold, for example, in a world where the time it takes to change from being a sender to receiver has been reduced, historically speaking, to almost an instant. Ireland did so at an extraordinary pace, and will likely have reversed the process again this year due to the economic crisis. Critics of Europe's postwar guest worker programmes used to say that there's nothing so permanent as a temporary migrant, but the flows of people since the 2004 enlargement round suggests the permanent/temporary dichotomy has lost some of its value as well.

Most agree that post-enlargement migration from east to west has been a mutually beneficial exchange. A report sponsored by the European Commission this week found that the westward flow of people – more than one million people are estimated to have moved in the period 2004 to 2007 to western Europe from the states that joined in 2004 – was boosting the economy of the bloc by nearly €50 billion a year, or about 0.8 per cent of GDP. It also estimated that the impact of enlargement on labour markets in western Europe had been limited, putting "slight" downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on unemployment.

Newer member-state governments generally take a positive view of what has been occurring. Romania's ambassador to Ireland, Iulian Buga, says tens of thousands of his country's emigrants have returned home to open businesses with funds and experience gained abroad, while his Polish counterpart, Tadeusz Szumowski, points to the economic and social gains that both Ireland and Poland have made from the arrival of so many of his compatriots in recent years. Last year, some €1.5 billion was sent to Poland from Ireland via the banking system, a figure significantly higher than the value of trade between the two countries, which is about €1.2 billion.

"Whenever I'm asked what's the most important link between Ireland and Poland, apart from the European Union, of course, I point to this amount of money," Szumowski says. "Extraordinary amounts of money."

He also points to rising Irish investment in Poland, the increasing numbers of people travelling between the two countries on holiday, and the deeper mutual understanding that comes from the thousands of Polish-Irish friendships that have begun in classrooms, workplaces and pubs across the country.

Their general approval notwithstanding, however, the authorities in Poland and other countries have been keen to tempt their mostly young and well-educated emigrés back home. Local governments in Wroclaw and Warsaw have run campaigns to persuade Poles in Ireland and Britain to return, and the Polish government's funding for 10 Polish schools in Ireland, where children are offered classes in their language, history and geography every weekend, is an indication of its desire not to sever the link with home.

Of course, the fifth anniversary of the 2004 enlargement round falls at a time of deep uncertainty. Economies are shrinking, unemployment is rising and immigrants are disproportionately feeling the effects of the recession. Although some continue to travel, there has been a sharp decline in the numbers of new arrivals from the east registering in west European countries.

How many Poles may choose to return is anybody's guess. If, in a few decades, however, the popular hunch is confirmed and it turns out that a great many decided to stay put through the crisis of 2009, then we may look back on this as the moment when a radically fluid and ephemeral phenomenon took on the air of something altogether more lasting.

© 2009 The Irish Times

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