Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [55]
Poland, from EU accession in 2004 until the economic crisis of 2008, was deprived of skilled workers. Almost anyone with a trade, from plumbers and bricklayers to surgeons and MRI technicians, had left for the West. The economic logic of the farm changed dramatically. Back when KRUS was the major source of farm income, it made sense to keep a small-hold farm in the family for generations. Now, there is no reason for another generation to stay on the land. Marian Snarski expects his farm to come to an end with his death; at some point before that, he will take EU afforestation grants and return all his land to forest in exchange for a few hundred dollars a year. Gosia Storczynski has an even more popular ambition: She wants to sell her father’s land to a larger, commercial farm, one with paid agricultural workers and proper land management.
The buyer of the land may end up being Krysztof Chlebowicz, the mayor of the adjoining village of Tykocin.‡ His main political role, as he sees it, is to help his constituents abandon peasant farming and to help those who remain consolidate their farms into commercial ventures. He plans to be one of them: In 1991–92, right after communism ended, he worked illegally in New York City and saved enough money to expand his five-hectare plot to 25 hectares; now he is using EU grants to buy up an additional seven hectares. “I am quite sure that only half the 1.5 million farms in Poland are actual farms,” he says. “The rest are just farmers waiting for their pensions—I’d say half of them now. I’d say that in five to 10 years it will drop to a quarter. In a natural way, the more enterprising farms are taking over the smaller and less productive ones. I’m a great example of this.”
The economic crisis that began in 2008 sent hundreds of thousands of Poles back eastward, returning home with savings, connections, and skills. Most of them returned not to their family villages but to the major cities and industrial regions of Poland. The Poles and eastern Europeans of the 2000s have made what scholars call a “J-turn”: They used migration to urbanize themselves in the cities of the Atlantic, then returned not to the village but to the major cities of their own countries, bringing savings and entrepreneurial knowledge with them. Their arrival ended the drought of skilled labor in Poland, and these arrival-city returnees contributed to economic revivals in Gdansk, Warsaw, and the “Polish silicon valley” of Wrocław, Cracow, and Upper Silesia. The Polish capital was by now experiencing genuine urban sprawl, and former rural areas around Warsaw’s perimeter were turning into new enclaves for ex-villagers who had arrived by way of the West. In large part as a result of this, Poland was the one of the few places in Europe that escaped the worst of the global economic downturn, experiencing economic growth (albeit at reduced levels) and maintaining exports. At long last, and in spite of its best efforts to the contrary, Poland was getting its arrival cities.
THE FINAL VILLAGE
Shuilin, Sichuan, China
At bedtime, six-year-old Pu Ming Lin picks up his little sister, Dong Lin, four, and lays her on the mat between him and their 56-year-old grandmother, He Su Xiou. As the three of them curl up together beside the fading embers of the kitchen fire, they are lulled by the gentle snoring of the two fat pigs in the pen on the other side of the thin wall, the faint hum of the beehive on the wall, and the somewhat rougher snoring of their grandfather in the next room. These are the warm bodies in the village of Shuilin today. They are the only sorts of bodies to be found in most villages across China now: small children, livestock, grandparents. Anyone between about 14 and 55 years of age, including the parents of all the children, has vanished, leaving quiet evenings, empty rooms, and a palpable, constant ache.
They rise