Giving meaning to migration. Polish migrants in Belgium and their relatives and friends who stayed in or returned to Poland, 1945-2008.

This historical-anthropological research project focuses on people from two streams who migrated from Poland to Belgium and on their relatives and friends in Poland. The first stream concists of people who fought in the Warsaw uprising in 1944, travelled to German afterwards and found their way to belgium via scholarships or mining contracts, the second stream of temporary labour migrants from Eastern Poland who started to work regularly in Belgium from the 1970s onwards. Despite the diversity in descent, religion and gender, the different push-factors for migration (war and labour respectively) and the different geopolitical context, in Belgium these people are commonly brought together under the homogenising, ethnified umbrella term of 'Polish migrants'. This project aims to unravel the meaning of migration by examining the relations of migrants with their relatives and friends who stayed in Poland, or later returned from belgium and uses for this purpose archival sources and anthropological fieldwork (in-depth interviews and participant observation). It sill analyse how different push-factors, in combination with different political opportunity structures, over time stimulated different migration streams to belgium which generated specific, always different, consequences for the migrants, their relatives and friends. In addition, it will exlore how migrants, their family members and friends gave meaning to these consequences and in what way they accordingly oriented their identifications.

Keywords:Polish Migrants, Belgium, Migration

Disciplines:History