Causes, scale and consequences of outside migrations from Poland

Andrzej D. Raczaszek, University of Economics, Katowice, Poland

Migrations abroad constitute, at the moment, one of the basic research problems in Poland and in the united Europe. Over 100 years ago E. G. Ravenstein presented the basic laws concerning human migrations. Observing the migration processes nowadays we may notice that many of these laws are still valid. The migrations from Poland also prove the validity of Ravenstein’s migration laws. The dynamic analysis concerning the outside migrations from Poland indicates also some others specific causes. Since the end of the World War II the emigration from Poland was fluctuating considerably, which was mainly a result of political and economic causes. This study concerns the outside migrations from Poland and points to the periods of increased emigration and to the causes of migration’s intensification. It also highlights the influence of migration processes on the country’s population. The study presents the scale of this phenomenon in the subsequent decades after 1945. Such a chronological structure of the analysis requires pointing out the years and periods of exceptional intensification of migration processes and the cause of these phenomena, as well as a lack of the complete picture of this phenomenon in the official population statistics.