The study intends to fill a gap in the literature on migration destination choice, which focuses on the outcome of a decision process, while largely neglects the very process of arriving at an outcome. Using qualitative material collected during 150 face-to-face interviews with Polish migrants to four EU countries and Australia, this article develops a general typology of decision makers involved in choices of migrant destinations. It applies the concept of bounded rationality to analyse the ways in which these migrants have chosen their host locations and, focusing on their rationality, explores manifestations of its boundedness. It also discusses the issue of information search by destination choice, showing that under relatively low perceived risks associated with migration, the process of knowledge building tends to be based on experience rather than on in-depth research.

Poland’s accession to the EU exponentially increased the mobility of its citizens and changed the geography of Polish migration to Western Europe. Poles go abroad to improve their livelihoods: to work, earn competitive wages, and to study. Post-accession migrants hail mainly from small communities. The paper is based on empirical research in a small community of Wronka in the West Pomeranian Voivodship. The goal of this case study was to reconstruct the history of labour mobility of Wronka’s residents, identify migration paths of their families, and analyse the effects of labour migration on the sending community. Departing from the customary analytical lens, this study analyses Polish mobility from the point of view of the sending, not the destination community. In the context of Wronka, mobility has become the norm in this previously immobile community centred around the state-owned farm, and appears to be a strategy used to cope with social, economic, and political change.

The totalitarian regime in Albania was considered as one of the most rigid and isolated in all of Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1991. Starting from 1990 when the system collapsed, Albania has witnessed one of the great migrations of recent times. This Balkan country has experienced the highest level of international migration after the fall of the communist regime compared to other post-communist countries in Eastern Europe. The paper seeks to understand the phenomenon of Albanian emigration (from Albania – not from other parts of the Balkans e.g. Kosovo, Macedonia) as one of the major features of post-totalitarian legacy. The first part of the text provides a brief overview of the Albanian communism system, the second part is an analysis of different waves of Albanian emigration after the collapse of communism, and the third part presents the current situation regarding Albanian migration. The article offers an overview of Albanian post-communist migration and represents a summary of up-to-date knowledge about this phenomenon.

The article analyses legal regulations with regard to the activities of the so-called EU “migration agencies”. In accordance with the adopted assumption, EU policy-making in the area of migration is based to a large degree on the principle of the priority of migration security. This principle entails the adoption of the highest standards of security with regard to all the actors of the migration process. The solidarity right to migration security is also related to the above principle. A special role in the implementation of the EU migration policy is played by the so-called decentralized “migration agencies”: Frontex, EASO and eu-LISA. The author discusses the legal regulations pertaining to the activities of the said agencies and the level of the implementation of the regulations, focusing especially on the period after April 2015, i.e. after the escalation of the migration crisis.

The article is an introduction to the subject matter of the New Sanctuary Movement. The New Sanctuary Movement is a religious-political organization which helps undocumented US immigrants avoid deportation. Although its activity is based on the biblical right to shelter in a sanctuary, not all Christians support its existence. This topic is particularly important during Donald Trump’s presidency, since cutting off all federal funds to the so-called sanctuary cities – states, counties or cities which belong to the New Sanctuary Movement, was a key point of his “Make America Great Again” election program. The activity of the New Sanctuary Movement has been analyzed from within the context of the concept of civil disobedience.

The aim of the article is to analyze the situation of economic immigrants on the West Pomeranian labor market. The data on immigration to Zachodniopomorskie Voivodship is related to the characteristics of the regional labor market. The authors refer to data from interviews with migrants and experts. On this basis, the analysis of the families and economic and social situation of economic immigration was made. The collected data indicate that the vast majority of economic migrants in the West Pomeranian Voivodship were Ukrainians. Their arrival in the West Pomeranian region was related with relatively high wages, and with the linguistic and cultural proximity of Poland (pull factors). The research shows that at the moment we are dealing with phenomena which are typical of first wave immigration in the West Pomeranian Voivodship. This stage is characterized by a more frequent change of place of employment, longer working hours and, among other, a smaller number of contacts between immigrants.

The regions considered in the text embrace north-western and north-eastern Africa, the Near East and the Arabian Peninsula – regions dominated by the peoples of Arabic descent.
The first emigrants from the Polish territories began to arrive in Arabic countries as early as the Middle Ages and early Modern times. It was only from the end of the 18th century that the numbers began to grow, yet this part of the world has never been an attractive destination for settlement for Polish emigrants. The largest groups settled there during World War II, comprised of political refugees from the territories occupied by the Third Reich and those evacuated from the Soviet Union.
The emigrants from Poland who made their way to Arabic countries can be divided into three groups. The first was formed by the political-military emigration – officers in the Turkish army, soldiers of the French and Spanish Foreign Legion, military troops participating in the battles of World War II. The economic and gainful employment-oriented emigration were the second group, constituted by craftsmen, professionals, artists, research and engineering personnel of the 19th and 20th centuries. Finally, the third was derived from socio-cultural emigration, i.e. members of the clergy who provide their services in this part of the world or Polish-Arabic married couples.

The article is dedicated to the study of the attitudes of Polish young adults towards ritual slaughter,  which was conducted in the year 2015 on a sample of university students in Białystok, Poland. It is a part of an intersectional research on subjects’ attitudes towards the presence of Muslims, exemplified by various forms of their participation in society, including the expression of their beliefs and everyday practices which are grounded in Islamic tradition. The article presents an analysis of attitudes towards ritual slaughter with the aim of discovering what could shape respondents’ approval vs disapproval. It entails three contextualized scenarios related to the halal issue: a) ritual slaughter conducted in Poland, b) import and c) sales of meat obtained in concordance with Islam, including the no-stunning principle. For the purpose of investigating mechanisms of disapproval, the project encompasses comprehensive dependent and independent variables, i.e. subjects’ denomination and religious practice, political orientation, self-defined local, national and European identities/territorial attachment and the feelings of threat – the latter is prompted by conventional representations of Islam and its disciples as being the enemies of the West and potential terrorists.
The feeling of threat is of significant interest in the article as the existing literature on attitudes towards Muslims and other minority groups suggests that it could be a factor in attitude formation towards otherness, namely: that its higher levels are related to the disapproval of ‘the others’, their cultural characteristics and practices. Therefore, we suspect that generalized feelings of threat may translate into negative attitudes towards the practice of ritual slaughter, i.e. preparation of meat in line with the requirements of Judaism and Islam. We find support for this hypothesis but only with respect to feelings of national threat.

The article shows the confrontation of two immigrant groups – repatriates and refugees – operating in the social space. This confrontation, together with the refugee crisis in Europe and the politicization of problems affecting both groups, becomes subject to social polarization. Two anthropological categories are used for the analysis of the phenomenon: the opposition of Us and Them (Swoi and Obcy), and the “unifying” notion of community. The second is treated as being manifested on two levels – on nationality and on sharing a common fate. The process of assigning the characteristics of homeliness or strangeness to both groups, of joining or excluding from the community, is relativized under the influence of current world events and their social reception has been co-shaped to a large extent by the official discourse. The main thesis resulting from the analysis of the presented situation is that attempts to invoke the community of the fate of all migrants made by pro-immigrant and pro-refugee activists, in the face of fear caused by the crisis related to the influx of refugees, collide in an unequal struggle with the identity-community as a priority in an emergency situation. In the text, I use the results of two-year research conducted in the repatriate community and impressions as a participant and observer of the public debate on refugees in Poland.

The article presents a novel, previously unused, form of the demonstration of national feelings, namely the Polish funeral in exile. Like a special form of a patriotic manifestation in a seemingly natural way, somehow involuntarily, it transpires to be an important element of the work of the Polish school at Batignolles. The presentation of the role of the burial ceremonies in the pedagogical practice of the largest Polish educational institution in the West, is a presentation of a completely unknown sphere of emigrant teaching. Both the funeral itself and the customs which were developed over the years, became a permanent part of the Batignol educational and didactic program. They have influenced the cultural and ethnic identity of the youngest diaspora, taught history and Polish customs, and strengthened the sense of national dignity. Through the periodic mourning, processions and similar manifestations, the typical young emigrant’s identity has been shaped. By showing the importance and durability of such a patriotic and sorrowful education, it is possible to present the role of the school and its extracurricular education in constructing and transferring the permanent national identification to subsequent generations brought up in exile.

In the interwar period, there were over half a million Poles in France. After the war, the communist Polish government decided to bring them back to Poland. In 1946–1949, about 70,000 people came from France to Poland. They lived mainly in Upper and Lower Silesia. They found it hard to adjust to living in Poland, with the country having been devastated during the war and being ruled by an increasingly dangerous communist regime. Some, therefore, returned to France but most of them chose to remain whilst retaining their ties with France.

From Kraków to Ottawa. Maria Flora Zielińska – a piece of Poland in Canada
Maria Flora Zielińska, née Nałęcz-Odrzywolska, left Krakow in 1957. With her husband Janek, she settled first in Montreal, later in Ottawa. Maria, a woman of great temperament and heart, worked tirelessly for her beloved Poland, Polish diaspora and Canada for over half a century. When still in Poland, she completed her studies at the Jagiellonian University, and then in Canada – library studies at McGill University. She was active in almost all Ottawa’s Polish diaspora organizations, representing them in the Canadian fora. Professionally, she worked for the university library in Montreal and the National Library Canada in Ottawa, but she also helped establish libraries at Polish diaspora institutions. She created and for over 20 years served as head of the Multilingual Biblioservice, a library service for Canadian ethnic groups within the National Library Canada. It was one of the most important institutions supported by the P.E. Trudeau government as part Canada’s cultural pluralism policy. Krakow remained her great love until the end of her life. She often returned to the city to stroll in the Old Town, to go to St. Mary’s Church and to the Noworol Café, to visit friends, just to stay in town for a while. In the Zielińskis’ Ottawa apartment newcomers were always welcome, not only those from Poland. She died in the fall of 2016 at the age of 95.

A reflection on culture in the context of transnationalism
Starting from the general Steven Vertovec’s definition of transnationalism, this paper uses four out of six of his takes on the mentioned term. Transnationalism as the social morphology, type of consciousness, mode of cultural reproduction and (re)construction of ‘place’ or locality – each of these meanings became a contribution to considerations related to issues oscillating around a broadly and variously understood culture.