Positive Poles

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Izabella Chudzicka in Dublin.

Sarah Doyle for TIME

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When Michal Kalwasinski, a young manager at a Vodafone outlet outside Dublin, goes home to the southwestern Polish city of Wroclaw, he no longer bothers to look up his old friends. What would be the point? "They've all left for Britain," he says. With good reason. Polish migration expert Pawel Kaczmarczyk, of Warsaw's Center of Migration Research, says that for a typical Polish villager, "it has become no more difficult to get work in London than in Warsaw--it may even be easier."

When Poland was admitted to the European Union, politicians across Europe viewed the prospect of Poles moving into their countries with xenophobic disdain. In 2005, Philippe de Villiers, leader of France's Euro-skeptic Mouvement pour la France, darkly warned of the "Polish plumber and Estonian architect" triggering "the demolition of France's social and economic model." Before the E.U. admitted 10 new members in 2004, populist fears of unwashed hordes stealing jobs from locals led most of the old E.U. countries, including Germany, Austria and France, to seal their labor markets. In the end, only three of the E.U.'s then 15 countries--Ireland, Britain and Sweden--opened their labor markets in May 2004.

As feared, Poles poured into Britain and Ireland, but rather than undermine local economies, their enterprise and skills have helped the British and Irish economies remain robust. Conversely, unemployment is higher in France, which turned Poles away, than in Britain, where they were welcomed. The jobless rate in Ireland is just 4.5%; job-vacancy rates in some sectors rose in the past two years, to 17%. Over the past two years, according to an estimate by the Dublin-based Economic and Social Research Institute, migrant workers have added 2 percentage points to Ireland's gdp. And in December, citing increased migration to Britain, the British treasury raised its gdp growth estimate for the next five years, to 2.75% from 2.5%. "It's been a fantastic success story," said Jonathan Byrne, a senior executive at the Bank of Ireland, which has conducted extensive market research on the new arrivals. "Economically, socially, in every way, it has been a positive experience for our country."

The positions migrants are filling, economists say, are either ones that locals don't want or new positions altogether. In fact, the infusion of educated labor drove growth in host countries' most dynamic sectors. Izabela Chudzicka, 26, arrived with a diploma in economics and now stars in her own Polish-language TV show in Dublin. Ireland, she says, has given her opportunities she could only dream of at home. Sure, she would be ready to go back "if the job is there." But Ireland's 150,000 Poles form a viable submarket for Polish-language media. Chudzicka is like the majority of expatriate Poles, who have at least a secondary education, if not a university degree. Most are working at jobs--in hotels and restaurants, construction and agriculture--well below their skill levels but are earning far more than they could at home using their degrees.

The Polish success story is feeding the labor debate as the E.U. continues to expand to the east and new countries such as Romania and Bulgaria join. Despite their positive experience with immigrants, both Britain and Ireland decided to maintain labor restrictions on Romania and Bulgaria for the time being. And countries such as Germany and France are keeping the labor door shut to new member states--E.U. law permits them to do so until 2011.

Some experts are beginning to question that lockout strategy. Herbert Brücker, a migration expert at Germany's Institute for Employment Research, says Germany missed out by blocking the first waves of immigrants. "This was a perfectly qualified generation of people from Poland that would have come here. Five years from now, we may only get what is left over. It may be too late." That's why Finland, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain have decided to follow Britain and Ireland and open their markets to the eight new members from Eastern and Central Europe that joined the E.U. in 2004.

Had London and Dublin realized from the start just how many people intended to migrate, they might not have opened their markets in the first place. Britain had expected no more than 15,000 migrant laborers each year from the new E.U. countries; in Ireland 10,000 were predicted. While granting admission to all workers, both nations restricted migrants' access to welfare, thus pre-empting "welfare tourists" from leeching off the system.

In fact, 600,000 migrants went to Britain in the first two years, more than half of them from Poland, and more than 300,000 East Europeans landed in Ireland. Low-cost flights to Dublin from Katowice, Cracow and Wroclaw were jammed for months. Newspapers sprang up to serve the new arrivals; bulletin boards outside churches across Ireland advertised for laborers with many of the notices written in Polish. In one English county, officials have begun adding road signs in Polish because immigrant truck drivers were getting confused.

Nor are there significant indications of all this slowing down. Budget flights from Poland are still full of young people ready to sample a new life. In addition to Chudzicka's TV show, Ireland alone boasts six Polish newspapers, two radio programs and at least a dozen Polish websites. Poles can hear Mass in their native tongue in 100 places of worship across Ireland, and the community was just granted its own cathedral, which has about 2,000 worshippers every Sunday.

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, which hasn't been the case since, oh, 1550. Construction on the 2012 Olympic sites in London is about to ramp up, providing more jobs. Many Poles in London are "well-qualified workmen with very good experience," says Adam Wasilewski, a Polish immigrant who has invested in his own stoneware business in London and who hires mainly Poles. Tesco and Sainsbury's, the British supermarket chains, are stocking up on Polish brands.

Indeed, if there is one characteristic that distinguishes Poles, whether they are wielding a wrench 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 the 100 fellow countrymen he employs "are work oriented. They want to work a lot. They will work whenever you ask them."