Migration impact inside-out: stayers, sociology and social remittances

ABSTRACT

The article presents a novel approach to understanding the impact of migration on sending countries. It looks at the topic the other way round from conventional approaches. Rather than only studying migrants’ influence on countries of origin, as migration scholars naturally do, I recommend first mapping social trends in sending countries to understand the most significant changes, before analysing why change takes place. Such analysis involves qualitative sociological research to understand the causes of change: how social remittances and more indirect migration influences combine with other factors. Focusing on sending country residents, the approach also applies concepts and findings from receiving societies research. The approach encourages a thorough investigation of transnational social space, seeing sociological phenomena such as socialisation or social activism taking place across international borders. The case study is twenty-first century Europe, with its dense and diverse migration patterns. The article discusses my experience of applying the approach to Poland, suggesting that migration exposure’s special role may be to reinforce national trends (e.g. towards more open-to-difference attitudes) even in social groups and geographical locations which are generally more conservative. Finally, I discuss how the approach might be applied in other post-communist countries, as well as further afield.

KEYWORDS:

• Sending countries
• social remittances
• stayers
• Poland
• EU
• CEE

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Within the resident population there is a spectrum of different exposure to life abroad and, especially if one adopts a broad definition of ‘migration’, it is hard to draw a line between those with ‘no’ migration experience and those with ‘some’.

2 See for example the impacts of migration sections on the BBC Bitesize GCSE geography site http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/geography/migration/types_migration_rev3.shtml or the Polish educational site e-szkola: https://eszkola.pl/wos/emigracja-zarobkowa-polakow-skutki-8188.html (last accessed 31 December 2018).

3 Based on a survey by the telephone company Ringo.co (details unavailable).

4 Although statistics are uncertain, Poland today experiences net immigration, thanks to a recent influx of Ukrainians, most of whom are temporary migrants.

5 http://hdr.undp.org/en/data Human Development Data (1990–2017): Gender. Last accessed 31 December 2018.

6 http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/refreshTableAction.do?tab=table&plugin=1&pcode=t2020_50&language=en People at risk of poverty or social exclusion. Last accessed 9 January 2019.

7 These assertions are based mostly on various CBOS reports. For more detailed analysis, see White et al. 2018, Chapter 8.

8 For my 2006–2013 projects on return migration and family migration from Polish small towns and villages I interviewed a total of 229 people, most of them in Poland.

9 For example, as gathered by the main polling organisation CBOS and the government statistical agency GUS.

10 As in most of my previous projects, I offered payment for all the 2016 interviews, which helped secure the participation of less well-educated and poorer interviewees who might otherwise not have come forward.

11 http://www.iseivijosinstitutas.lt/contents. Last accessed 13 January 2019.

12 https://www.knomad.org/data/remittances. Remittance inflows (December 2018). Last accessed 9 January 2019.