Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [54]
For a decade and a half, Warsaw and Wrocław and Gdansk remained without arrival cities, and without the bursts of economic activity that go with them. An entire generation, millions of productive and creative people, remained trapped on non-farming farms, relegated to a perpetual agrarian past. Then, in 2004, Poland gained membership in the European Union and became attached to the larger world—a world that included major cities, on the other end of Europe, that were built for arrival. Overnight, the economic logic of the Polish farm changed.
After the Storczynski daughters finish school and move out of Poland, their family’s farm might end up looking like the nearby farm of 55-year-old Marian Snarski. His ramshackle collection of buildings on poor, sandy soil hardly seems to be functioning as an agriculture enterprise. The farm subsidies barely cover the cost of fertilizer, and Mr. Snarski has only his elderly wife and his teenaged daughter to work the fields. Yet a look at the family’s balance sheets reveals the new face of peasant farming. Farm income and subsidies from the EU and Poland provide only a couple of hundred dollars a month. But both of these are dwarfed by the packages of cash the Snarskis receive every month from their two daughters, aged 19 and 27, who have domestic-service jobs in Britain. By sending perhaps $400 a month, the girls have become the main source of income for the Snarski family.
If Poland’s policies were partially designed to prevent a flood of farmers from creating arrival cities in Warsaw and Gdansk, they ended up building a valuable pool of workers who flooded into the arrival cities of western Europe as soon as such mobility became possible. In the three years after Poland won its EU membership in 2004, between a million and two million citizens—most of them young, most of them villagers—left to work in the major cities of Britain and Ireland, as waiters, construction workers, domestic servants, child-care workers, drivers, shopkeepers, and factory hands. Entire districts of London became Polish arrival cities: One spread outward from the older Polish enclave of Hammersmith and Ealing in the west; another in the northern boroughs of Haringey and Enfield, in which dozens of shopfronts on every high street are now lettered entirely in Polish and defunct Anglican churches have converted into Polish-language Roman Catholic congregations. The mechanisms of the arrival city are highly visible here: Aid, marriage, housing provision, remittance-sending are all organized by specialized Polish services. Overnight, Poles became a dominant and generally popular and well-received British and Irish minority. Many Poles said they would stay temporarily, then move back; others married, started businesses, and began setting down roots. The rush of productive urbanization that Poland had long staved off was taking place on a dramatic scale somewhere else.
Together, these young villagers sent home more than $11 billion a year, amounting to 2.5 percent of Poland’s entire economy, more than almost any other industry.5 This foreign-remittance money, combined with Polish government pensions and other government payments, has become overwhelmingly the main source of farm income. As of 2004, only 27 percent of Poland’s rural inhabitants earned their basic income from agriculture; the rest,