The Influence of Migration on Origin Communities: Insights from Polish Migrations to the West TIM ELRICK Abstract This article sheds light on the impact of migration on origin communities by focusing on two case studies in different regions in Poland. Besides the economic consequences, the social and cultural consequences of migration for community cohesion and the lives of its members are highlighted, with reference to an emerging culture of migration in the communities. By presenting different migration patterns prevalent before and after Poland’s accession to the European Union, the article demonstrates the important differences caused by ‘visible migration’ and ‘hidden migration’ in the communities of origin, taking into account especially the temporal dimension. THE DISCUSSION AMONG JOURNALISTS, POLITICIANS and scholars about the impact of the 2004 European Union (EU) enlargement on member states has mostly focused on the existing pre-2004 members, the EU-15 countries. This one-sidedness is especially reflected in the topic of migration. For example, before that enlargement, acute concern was expressed about the prospect of migrants from Eastern Europe flooding the labour markets in the EU-15 and what this would mean for those countries (Bauer & Zimmermann 1999; Boeri & Bru¨cker 2000). However, researchers are becoming more and more aware of the fact that (international) migration, understood as a move from one country to another, has effects not just on the destination country but also on the origin country; they also recognise that migration, understood as a social process (Boyle & Halfacree 1998; Marshall & Foster 2002), concerns more than just the labour market, although most studies of sending countries still focus only on economic remittances. The research on which this article is based was conducted under the European Union Marie Curie Excellence Grant project ‘Expanding the knowledge base of European labour migration policies’ (KNOWMIG) (MEXT-CT-2003-002668). I am grateful to Emilia Brinkmeier (nee´ Lewandowska, University of Warsaw), who collaborated with me on a working paper from which this article is adapted. I am also grateful to Jennifer Elrick (Hamburg Institute of International Economics) and Anne White (University of Bath) for comments on an earlier version of this article and to all interviewees who shared their time and life histories with us. EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES Vol. 60, No. 9, November 2008, 1503–1517 ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/08/091503-15 ª 2008 University of Glasgow DOI: 10.1080/09668130802362243 Downloaded By: [Elrick, Tim] At: 09:08 15 October 2008