Word: polander
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...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...
...there significant signs of all this slowing down. Budget flights from Poland and other countries in Eastern Europe to Britain and Ireland are still full with young men and women 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; the community was just granted its own cathedral, a stone's throw from Dublin Castle, which has around 2,000 worshippers every Sunday...
Adam Wasilewski ENTREPRENEUR Many of those who left Poland over the past few years did so because they couldn't find a job. Adam Wasilewski, 38, left because he couldn't create enough of them. Owner of a stoneware company in Warsaw, he found that increasingly his clients were not paying their bills. "I couldn't plan an expansion," Wasilewski recalls. "I had the money, but only on paper." Around the same time, a contract came up to apply interior cladding to a high-rise at London's Canary Wharf. He took it. Wasilewski then moved his family to Britain...
Bozena Ukalska SHOP ASSISTANT A former religion teacher from southeastern Poland, Bozena Ukalska, 47, had already spent fruitless months job hunting when her husband was laid off from the local automobile plant. So in 2005, she says, "we decided to leave. That's better than sitting and crying and begging for help." They went to Spain where at first she worked illicitly, earning cash in hand as a cleaning lady. A year later, Spain opened its labor markets to new E.U. citizens and she took legal employment near Madrid in a shop selling Polish products. Today, Ukalska earns...
...LECTURER With a PhD in computer science and a specialization in computer-program troubleshooting, Bozena Wozna, 33, is the kind of person her country can ill afford to lose. She chose a teaching career in part because she believes the young science can play a vital role in stimulating Poland's new economy. But like many talented Poles, she decided three years ago that the opportunities elsewhere were too hard to pass up. She found a research job at King's College London and later taught at University College London. It was, she says, "a great adventure and a totally...