Post by Jaga on Jan 12, 2013 23:58:18 GMT -7
I found a very interesting article in Chicago press. There is also a short video showing three women returning back to Poland.
The standard of life increased so much in Poland that coming back is not a huge shock, they still have families in Poland, parents.
Just a couple of weeks ago I talked to my friend I met in Texas when I first came there. She had a good job in Texas and started building a house. The house in built in Poland she decided to go back to Poland. She took all her belonging, cat and is back there!
Going back home to Poland
www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-poland-reverse-migration-20130113,0,2868777.story
But life in the United States, they found, wasn't as easy as they had imagined. One woman suffered a health crisis. Another didn't qualify for a green card. A third got married and became a citizen, but still woke up in the middle of the night, worried about her aging parents in Krakow, and thought: "What am I doing here?"
Poland was calling them home.
"It was the paradox of every immigrant," explained Ola Kalarus, now 42. "You go somewhere for economic reasons. But you still miss the place you came from, even though you know it's poorer there and the life is perhaps not as good."
Just a decade before, the idea of going back would have been almost inconceivable. The gap between living standards in the two countries was too wide. The gravitational pull of the dollar was too strong. But in 2004, Poland joined the European Union, a move that, virtually overnight, gave Poles the opportunity to work legally anywhere in Europe. Suddenly, Poles didn't have to cross an ocean to find opportunity.
Instead they could hop on buses and planes to work in the continent's wealthy capitals — London, Berlin, Dublin and Rome — and still return home to spend holidays with their families.
At the same time, the collapse of communism in Poland had unleashed a pent-up wave of energy and innovation among Poles. State-controlled enterprise gave way to private investment, which boomed in the mid-1990s as entrepreneurs and foreign corporations scrambled into the country's newly freed markets.
During the global financial crisis in 2008, Poland was the only EU economy to avoid recession. While the U.S. economy shrank, Poland's continued to grow at a robust 5 percent and soon became among the fastest-growing in Europe. The gap between the countries had begun to narrow, and all at once, the forces that had guided generations of Poles toward America shifted into reverse.
Then, Poles in Chicago began doing something that was once unimaginable. They began packing up and going home. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of foreign-born Poles in Chicago dropped by 23,000 from 2000 to 2010.
At the Polish American Association, the entry-level ESL classes that were once packed with newly arrived Poles are now nearly empty. Attendance at Polish Saturday schools, where children learn to speak Polish, has dropped by 1,000 students over the past five years. And Polish travel agents, who once did a brisk business booking vacations, now advertise rates for shipping containers that can be used to send entire households back to Poland.
The standard of life increased so much in Poland that coming back is not a huge shock, they still have families in Poland, parents.
Just a couple of weeks ago I talked to my friend I met in Texas when I first came there. She had a good job in Texas and started building a house. The house in built in Poland she decided to go back to Poland. She took all her belonging, cat and is back there!
Going back home to Poland
www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-poland-reverse-migration-20130113,0,2868777.story
But life in the United States, they found, wasn't as easy as they had imagined. One woman suffered a health crisis. Another didn't qualify for a green card. A third got married and became a citizen, but still woke up in the middle of the night, worried about her aging parents in Krakow, and thought: "What am I doing here?"
Poland was calling them home.
"It was the paradox of every immigrant," explained Ola Kalarus, now 42. "You go somewhere for economic reasons. But you still miss the place you came from, even though you know it's poorer there and the life is perhaps not as good."
Just a decade before, the idea of going back would have been almost inconceivable. The gap between living standards in the two countries was too wide. The gravitational pull of the dollar was too strong. But in 2004, Poland joined the European Union, a move that, virtually overnight, gave Poles the opportunity to work legally anywhere in Europe. Suddenly, Poles didn't have to cross an ocean to find opportunity.
Instead they could hop on buses and planes to work in the continent's wealthy capitals — London, Berlin, Dublin and Rome — and still return home to spend holidays with their families.
At the same time, the collapse of communism in Poland had unleashed a pent-up wave of energy and innovation among Poles. State-controlled enterprise gave way to private investment, which boomed in the mid-1990s as entrepreneurs and foreign corporations scrambled into the country's newly freed markets.
During the global financial crisis in 2008, Poland was the only EU economy to avoid recession. While the U.S. economy shrank, Poland's continued to grow at a robust 5 percent and soon became among the fastest-growing in Europe. The gap between the countries had begun to narrow, and all at once, the forces that had guided generations of Poles toward America shifted into reverse.
Then, Poles in Chicago began doing something that was once unimaginable. They began packing up and going home. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of foreign-born Poles in Chicago dropped by 23,000 from 2000 to 2010.
At the Polish American Association, the entry-level ESL classes that were once packed with newly arrived Poles are now nearly empty. Attendance at Polish Saturday schools, where children learn to speak Polish, has dropped by 1,000 students over the past five years. And Polish travel agents, who once did a brisk business booking vacations, now advertise rates for shipping containers that can be used to send entire households back to Poland.