Some memories from communist Poland 🇵🇱 in 80's, when over 500'000 Poles desperately used *any* means available to escape the country. Many of them escaped through Austria, where they requested asylum and waited for months:
> I was with my husband, our kid had to stay in Poland with my parents as a hostage. In #communism families were not allowed to spend holidays abroad together. When Security Service saw we're not returning, they took away food coupons from my parents
> Poles weren't easy guests in Italian towns. Drinking, fighting between themselves, prostitution, camping in parks, forced "windscreen washing services" on junctions.
Generally tons of very interesting memories, some of them I share to the extent as a ~13 years old can see what his parents are doing. Very humbling, and very teaching in the context of today's debates on immigration.
I guess only those with relatives and resources were able to reach UK — employment in BBC Monitoring isn't for anyone 😉 The whole mass migration impact was absorbed mostly by Germany, Austria, Italy, and they could see the whole spectrum of people and behaviours there.
Most of them did settle down quickly as they certainly had entrepreneurial spirit and were used to hard work. In Poland though, the work was largely wasted, throttled and didn't pay enough to survive, so you can imagine the ego boost when the same work suddenly pays you 100x what you earned before and suddenly you can have decent living without much effort — because in Poland to survive you often had to have 2 or 3 jobs, so could be a professor during the day and a porter overnight.
in UK we got the wider wave of migration from Eastern Europe (and a larger variety of social classes) around the early 2000s due to EU free movement, especially in less affluent areas it was only begrudgingly accepted and as we know it led to Brexit - in spite of migrants being relatively non problematic in the medium/long term, but I remember young working class Brits being *really* angry about the competition for jobs and this was in early 2000s...
@kravietz I remember in late 1980s quite a few families from Warsaw Pact countries in Caversham, a lot of them were well educated middle class and employed at BBC Monitoring. Then around early 1990s and in 2000s following EU membership more folk arrived from Poland but by 21st century had near enough achieved "model minority" status, especially valued for hard work in construction industry and car washes/detailing (if I buy detailing supplies locally its often from Polish run companies)