Poles flood Britain, take new ideas back home

Maciek Machalak arrived in England, despondent. In his native Poland, he sold cars and kitchen equipment. He watched a dance studio fold and managed a toy store. Nothing worked. So in 2005, he left his wife, baby, and friends in the small city of Copernicus and joined the exodus to a Europe opening its job market.

Mr. Machalak was determined, but had a low opinion of himself – a residue of post-communist torpor, he says.

Today, after rising to a top waiter post in a swank London restaurant, he has a new outlook. "Before, I felt feeble, a nobody," he says. "Now, I am ... confident. I feel new possibilities."

Somewhere along the way, Machalak imbibed certain ideas, which he calls his rights. Indeed, a generation of Poles working abroad are adopting cosmopolitan values that are now seeping home. The election last month of a new pro-Europe president, Donald Tusk, was aided by youngish expatriates.

"In Poland ... I just accepted getting pushed around," says Machalak. "Now I will ask to speak to the manager. If you work hard ... you deserve decent treatment. I've learned to fight for what I think are my rights. I will bring this back to my country, as many other Poles are."

Since the European Union opened up to Eastern Europe in 2004, some 2 million Poles have flooded Britain and Ireland in one of the most intense shifts of migrants in Europe in recent memory. For years, immigrants in Britain were mainly Irish and South Asian. Now Poles, in an overnight flash of jet landings, are the third-largest ethnic group in England. Bucking immigrant tradition, they don't just settle in cities, but are spreading into towns small and large, according to a new Home Office study.

Contractors with college degrees

They have university degrees from Warsaw but rebuild bathrooms in London. They take crash courses in English. They farm, clean, wait tables, cook, fix machinery, go to night school – and save.

Poles have hit London so hard that an entire subculture of 'Polandia' is developing. Near Marble Arch, a Lebanese market sells Polish meatballs and sausage. Polish newspapers hang on downtown news stands. Poles have so quickly developed a reputation for home repair that most in the business have back orders.

The Institute for Public Policy Research here found in a recent study that Poles work for $5 to $7 cheaper per hour than do Britons.

Highly skilled immigrants "work harder" and are more reliable than Britons, according to the Home Office study, which included input from the British Treasury and Department for Work and Pensions.

"What distinguishes the Polish community is that they all came at the same time. Almost 600,000 arrived within a two-year period," says Katinka Barysch, deputy director of the Center for European Reform in London. "I think it could be the political landscape in Poland. People have come here, worked hard, fought for themselves, been successful, so they can go back to Poland and will demand something better and different."

In many European cities, Poles are quietly achieving a classic success story at a time when the word "immigration" is often mouthed in Europe, however unfairly, as code for migrants that don't want to integrate. In 2008 in France, Poles will be allowed access without a work permit. "We will be coming in large numbers," says Samuel Kuca, a Paris cook from south Poland who moved west two years ago with four of his five college roommates.

Politically, there's been a conservative backlash against foreigners in the EU. France recently passed stricter laws for non-EU immigrants. Swiss elections won by the conservative People's Party last month had opposition to immigration as a key issue. In Italy this week, opposition leader Silvio Berlusconi asked that Romanians be blocked, and other immigrants expelled, and Pope Benedict spoke of immigrant obligations. Bulgarians and Romanians are still blocked from working in England, since their accession to the EU is so recent. There is also an openly negative public attitude about them in England.

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