BUSI 464 Week 6 International Markets Integration and Social Issues Essay 2 Example

Open Borders, Empty Chairs: How European Union Membership Has Reshaped Polish Society

Introduction

When Poland joined the European Union on May 1, 2004, together with nine other countries, it entered the deepest form of regional integration the world has produced: a customs union, a single market for goods, services and capital, and, most consequential for ordinary Poles, the free movement of workers. This essay argues that free movement, more than trade in goods, has defined what membership means for Polish society. It reshaped where Poles work, what they earn at home, and how families live, sometimes across a thousand miles.

Accession and Its Economic Result

Lynch (2010) presents the European Union as the most developed regional agreement, one in which members surrender part of their sovereignty to common institutions. Joining required years of preparation: Poland had to adopt the body of EU law, reform courts and public administration, and open protected sectors. The reward was large. Campos et al. (2019) compared each country that joined the European Union with a statistical stand-in built from similar countries that stayed out, and found that membership raised incomes per person by about 12 percent on average in the following decade, with Poland among the clear gainers. Few economic policies in modern Europe have raised living standards as much as accession did for the countries of the 2004 enlargement.

Emigration on a New Scale

The social story begins with departures. Britain, Ireland and Sweden opened their labor markets to the new members immediately in 2004, and hundreds of thousands of Poles left within a few years to work in construction, food processing, care and hospitality. Others followed when more countries opened their markets. For many young Poles from small towns with high unemployment, a job in Dublin or Manchester paid several times what they could earn at home. Emigration became a common rite of passage, and whole towns came to depend on money sent back by relatives abroad.

Wages for Those Who Stayed

Emigration changed the labor market at home. Dustmann et al. (2015) studied Polish emigration and found that the departures raised the wages of workers who remained, because emigrants were concentrated among certain skill groups and their absence tightened the market for those skills. The gains were largest for workers with intermediate skills, the group that emigrated most, while the effects on the least and most skilled were small. For a Polish electrician or welder who stayed, free movement brought a raise without leaving home. The gains were not felt everywhere equally, though; regions that lost the most young workers also lost customers for local shops and pupils for local schools, so the benefit to individual wages came alongside a hollowing of some small towns. For employers, it meant labor shortages, and some sectors began recruiting workers from Ukraine and other countries outside the Union to fill the gaps.

Farms, Roads and Regions

Membership also changed the Polish countryside. Polish farmers, once among the most anxious opponents of accession, became eligible for the Common Agricultural Policy's direct payments and rural development funds, and EU structural funds paid for motorways, rail upgrades, water systems and town squares across the country. Many farm families found their incomes steadier than before, and the money helped modernize dairies and orchards to meet EU food standards. The same standards, however, pushed some very small farms and slaughterhouses out of business, because they could not afford the investments compliance required. The countryside gained infrastructure and a safety net, while the smallest producers bore the cost of the single market's rules. For many villages, the visible signs of membership were a new road with an EU flag on the sign and a younger generation working abroad.

Families Across Borders

The most painful effects fell on families. When parents worked abroad, often one parent and sometimes both, children were left with the other parent, grandparents or relatives. Polish media coined a name for the children whose parents worked abroad, and teachers and social workers raised concerns about their schooling and emotional well-being. Elderly parents in rural areas lost the adult children who would traditionally have cared for them. Migration also brought money that paid for education, housing and medical care, so families faced a trade-off between presence and provision that no treaty negotiator had weighed. Cheaper flights and video calls softened the separation over time, and many migrants returned after a few years with savings and new skills, but for a generation of children, membership meant a parent who came home only for holidays.

The Migrants Abroad

The migrants themselves were often caricatured in the countries that received them. The evidence tells a different story. Dustmann et al. (2010) estimated the fiscal effects of migrants from the 2004 accession countries in the United Kingdom and found that they paid considerably more in taxes than they received in benefits and public services, because most were young, employed and unlikely to claim support. Yet many worked in jobs well below their qualifications, and some faced exploitation by agencies and landlords. Free movement gave them rights on paper; enforcing those rights in a foreign country was harder. After Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, many Polish workers there faced new uncertainty about their status, and some returned home, which illustrates how dependent their lives had become on the agreement's survival.

Conclusion

European Union membership raised Polish living standards substantially and gave Poles the freedom to work anywhere in the Union. It also emptied chairs at family tables, drew skilled workers abroad and left employers short of labor. For businesses operating across Europe, the lesson is that workers who cross borders are people with families, not interchangeable units of labor. Leviticus 19:34 told Israel to treat the stranger living among them as one of their own and to love the foreigner as themselves (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016). Employers who pay migrants fairly, house them decently and respect their qualifications put that command into practice.

References

Campos, N. F., Coricelli, F., & Moretti, L. (2019). Institutional integration and economic growth in Europe. Journal of Monetary Economics, 103, 88-104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmoneco.2018.08.001

Dustmann, C., Frattini, T., & Halls, C. (2010). Assessing the fiscal costs and benefits of A8 migration to the UK. Fiscal Studies, 31(1), 1-41. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5890.2010.00106.x

Dustmann, C., Frattini, T., & Rosso, A. (2015). The effect of emigration from Poland on Polish wages. The Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 117(2), 522-564. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjoe.12102

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Lynch, D. A. (2010). Trade and globalization: An introduction to regional trade agreements. Rowman & Littlefield.