In Polish towns built on emigration and diaspora wages, Brexit poses a new hurdle

Joanne Klepadlo’s daughter was two years old when her husband left to work in Germany, driven by the closure of a local factory and what she called a “spirit of immigration” ingrained in this northeastern region of Poland.

He was gone for 12 years. Cellphones were still rare when he left, so they wrote letters that took two weeks to arrive. She saved their correspondence, years of notes that lie in a tall pile at home.

“We were both young and beautiful then,” she said in an interview at the preschool where she serves as director.“We spent our most beautiful years in separation.”

Decades of emigration by families like the Klepadlos have quite literally shaped Monki, a town of about 11,000 that sent so many young men and women to the United States in the 1980s and 1990s that people throughout Poland started saying it was “built on dollars” they sent back. Shortly before Poland’s 2004 accession to the European Union, the migrant flow shifted toward the capitals of Europe: mainly Brussels, but also London and Berlin.

Britain’s historic decision last month to exit the EU will directly impact towns like Monki if conservative British politicians make good on their promise to tighten controls on immigration. According to Poland’s official statistics office, more than 2 million Poles live outside the country, most in Europe, and an estimated 853,000 Polish citizens live in the United Kingdom, according to a 2015 Office for National Statistics report. Since Poland joined the EU, the northeastern Podlaskie voivodeship, or province, where an unemployment rate of 11.1 per cent in May slightly exceeded the national average of 9.1 per cent, has been one of the country’s leaders in exporting its labour.

“Our feelings about the United States are about emotions, family relations and traditions,” Mayor Zbigniew Karwowski said in an interview. “But the European migration is more for the reasons of money. People go, it’s close, they earn the money, and bring it back here.”