How The West Was Won

(3 of 5)

It's a similar picture across the Irish Sea. A report this year from the Von Hügel Institute in Cambridge suggested that, with the influx of East Europeans, Catholicism could soon be the dominant religion in Britain. Tesco and Sainsbury's, the British supermarket chains, have begun stocking Polish canned goods, vodka brands and such imported Polish delicacies as pickled cabbage to cater to the growing community. Construction on the Olympic sites in London is about to ramp up, providing more laboring jobs. Many Poles in London are "well-qualified workmen with very good experience," says Adam Wasilewski (see profile), a Polish immigrant who has invested in his own stoneware business in London and who hires mainly Poles to work on his jobs.

Indeed, if there is one characteristic that marks out Poles, whether wielding a spanner or a stethoscope, it's a capacity for work — at least, that's what many employers say. Jarek Czernek, the general manager of Aluglass Ireland, a business that installs glass siding, says that the 100 fellow countrymen he employs "are work oriented. They want to work a lot. They will work whenever you ask them."

That work ethic is being applied by young migrant workers — 82% of the new East European workers in Britain are between 18 and 34 — even if it means swapping desk jobs for building sites. Take Robert Domanski, 29, a law graduate from Warsaw University. In 2003, he followed several friends to Dublin. Today he logs 10 hours a day as a roofer, and recently put money down on a new Dublin home. "In Poland, I would have to work many, many years to have the same standard of living," he says. Wlodzimierz Oska, 44, a cleaner on the same construction site, sends j1,000 home each month to his family in western Poland, enough so that his wife could quit her job to tend to their four children. A trained electrician, he makes twice as much sweeping up wood chips as he did at home plying his trade. It isn't just the guys on the construction sites that put in the hours; Bozena Ukalska, 47, a shop assistant (see profile), is one of those who did not choose Britain or Ireland. She settled outside Madrid, works weekends and holidays. But she knows what is required: "You come here to work," Ukalska says.

The new migrants have changed local labor markets. Not long ago, Irish companies in the building sectors could not find enough workers to make their businesses grow the way they wanted. Wages were spiraling to "ridiculous" levels, says John Dunne, the chief executive of Chambers Ireland, a business lobby group. Now, with 60,000 to 70,000 new workers arriving each year from Eastern Europe, wages are 4% lower than they would have been, according to Dublin's Economic and Social Research Institute. Opening the doors to Polish and other workers was not "just good," says Dunne. "It was essential. If we hadn't had 50-80,000 a year, the economy would have collapsed. And that continues to be the case."

A squeeze on wages is one of the things labor unions feared most about the influx. Yet they also see benefits in the opening of labor markets. "It's good for Britain," says Owen Tudor, head of the international-relations section of the British Trades Union Congress. "[Migrant workers] are here to work and they are helping the economy grow." Many of the new migrants are signing up to labor unions (Poland has a long tradition of unionism) and recently a British union, gmb, opened a branch in Southampton exclusively for migrant workers.

The more Poles establish communities abroad, the easier it is for those left behind to join them. Michal Kalwasinski, a young manager at a Vodafone outlet outside Dublin, says when he goes home to the southwestern Polish city of Wroclaw and calls up his friends, "they've all left for Britain." These days, says Polish migration expert Pawel Kaczmarczyk of Warsaw's Center of Migration Research, for a Polish villager, "it has become no more difficult to get work in London than in Warsaw — it may even be easier."