Looking west for work

Copernicus Airport. 12:52 p.m.

A former Polish soldier arrives from Ireland, where he waits tables and studies computers. He shimmies through customs and tows his suitcases out sliding glass doors, just as two lovers with new passports step to the ticket counter for a flight to the British Midlands and jobs in a cookie factory.

Babies wail, duffel bags zip shut, tears fall on winter coats. Every day is like this. Poles come and go, ferried across Europe on budget airlines to new, unsure lives. Married and single, college graduate and high school dropout, they make up a large part of the continent’s growing class of economic migrants.

“My company went bankrupt, and there’s no future in my town,” said Monika Przebieracz, conversing in Polish while standing in the departure lounge with her fiance, Dawid Dorociak, a thin man with matted hair and a pewter stud in his eyebrow. “But how will we manage in Britain? What about the language?”

“This is our first time on a plane,” said Dorociak said, listening to the rip of tickets and the thunk of passport stamps. “We land in Not-ting-ham.”

Then, as if mimicking phrases from a Berlitz book, he added in English: “Thank you, thank you, thank you very much.”

The expansion of the European Union has loosened borders and increased opportunities for Poles and other Eastern Europeans. Since Poland joined the EU in 2004, between 600,000 and 2 million of its people have slipped away to foreign lands for work, mainly in Britain, Ireland and Sweden. They’ve left behind shriveling villages, high unemployment and low wages. Although many find only modest jobs as laborers and waiters, they are fattening their bank accounts while blending into new cultures.

Their journeys add a distinctly European spin to the global movement of job seekers. The World Bank estimates that expatriate workers sent $250 billion to their poorer native countries in 2005. Poland’s economic emigrants funneled home $7.4 billion that year, $2.6 billion more than three years earlier, the Polish central bank says. The real amount may be double the official tally. It’s never fully counted because much of it arrives stuffed in bags and billfolds.

It would seem a dream fulfilled for Poland. It’s also a caution to be careful what you wish for.

Through decades of communism, Poles longed to be part of capitalist Europe. Now this nation of 39 million is losing citizens to Western prosperity when it needs them to fuel its own economy. Foreign companies are expected to create hundreds of thousands of jobs here in the coming years. Major European manufacturers are planning to build new facilities in Wroclaw.

But with some of the nation’s best-educated and youngest workers opting to leave, who will work here? Who will be the bricklayers, the computer experts, the dentists?

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Meet Pawel Romaszkan, a broad-faced man with a gargantuan mission: bringing the Poles home, preferably back to Wroclaw. Officials say the future of this city of 640,000 people near the German border, where an elegant town square evokes bohemian shabbiness mixed with communist neglect, depends on it.

“We’re trying to build a brand-name city. We’ve attracted companies like Philips, Siemens, Volvo and 3M, but we must have workers,” said Romaszkan, who visits Polish community centers in London and pubs in Dublin trying to woo back his countrymen.

“If we can get a few to return, others will follow.... A monthly transportation pass in London costs about 100 pounds. That’s equivalent to a mortgage payment on a small apartment in Wroclaw.”

Romaszkan knows the alleys where Polish workers sip Guinness in Ireland, the British churches where they say rosaries and offer confessions, the Internet cafes where they find out who died, who was born and whose heart was broken. He also knows that just by looking into people’s eyes, you can tell whether they have moved beyond your grasp.

“For many Poles, London is a magical city,” he said. “I talked to one computer specialist who’s been offered a job in London that pays twice what the mayor of Wroclaw earns. This guy told me, ‘I’m not coming back.’ ”

In 2002, about 300,000 passengers traveled through Copernicus Airport; in 2006, the number was 700,000. The increase in part reflects a high unemployment rate and salaries that are a quarter to a half of going rates in Western Europe. Many foreign corporations moved east to save money and have been reluctant to raise wages. Competition for labor has gradually begun to increase pay, but Poland’s economic growth is in jeopardy if there are not enough of the right kinds of workers.

Growth accelerated after the end of communism, then slowed. Since 2004, the economy has regained some momentum, expanding 5.2% last year. Although that is more than 2 percentage points higher than the average of the more developed EU economies, it is lower than that of other new EU members.

Mayor Rafat Dutkiewicz envisions Wroclaw as a high-tech research hub. The city has 134,000 students attending 23 institutions of higher education. The mayor is seeking about $1.3 billion in EU and other funding to create a European Institute of Technology in which the city’s universities would collaborate with firms such as Hewlett-Packard Co., LG.Philips LCD Co. and Whirlpool Corp. The goal: 100,000 new jobs over the next five years.

The region’s 17% unemployment rate would seem to provide thousands of potential employees, but many of the jobless have few skills or have stopped looking for work. The most motivated and best-educated tend to look abroad. In a British cookie factory, a woman like Przebieracz can make four times the $320 a month she could earn in a Polish office.

She is part of a baby boom that swept through Poland in the early 1980s, when Communist authorities tried to suppress dissent by keeping people off the streets. This “martial law generation” later flooded colleges and universities but found few jobs in their chosen fields.

Restless, and increasingly agitated by government corruption scandals, they perfected their English and peeled away.

About 30% of those leaving Poland have college degrees. In Britain, most are doing work that requires only limited skills.

“It may look like a brain drain, but it’s really something else. It’s a brain waste,” said Pawel Kaczmarczyk, chief demographer at the Center of Migration Research at Warsaw University.

Even some poorly educated or semi-skilled Poles are packing their bags. President Lech Kaczynski quipped recently that he couldn’t find someone to paint his house because the painters had all moved away. Building sites have gone quiet as construction firms raid one another’s employees.

The fabled Gdansk shipyard is short 200 welders and builders. Unable to hire thousands of seamstresses, textile companies are losing contracts. Perhaps the biggest irony is that Poland is expected to receive about $40 billion from the EU for highway projects when there is a shortage of people to do the work.

This is the unfolding tale of Europe. As the borders of the EU widen, those in the formerly communist east want Western lifestyles. The emigration scenario will probably repeat in January, when Romania and Bulgaria join the EU.

But the Poles have an edge. They moved to Britain and Ireland before Western European countries adopted stricter immigration barriers that will limit opportunities in coming months.

The westward movement of Poles and other East Europeans, including Latvians, Lithuanians and Czechs, has created a second wave. Workers from non-EU countries farther east, such as Ukraine and Belarus, view Warsaw as Poles view London.

Despite Poland’s own unemployment problem, legal and illegal foreign workers have been arriving in large numbers since 2000. The country issues as many as 25,000 work permits to foreigners annually. Officials say, however, that hundreds of thousands of migrants are scattered across the nation, working for wages that may barely support a Pole but could make a huge difference in Kiev or Minsk.

One estimate suggests that 200,000 illegal Ukrainians work in Poland, many in agriculture. In some cases, they baby-sit for families in which the father or mother is working in London or Dublin. “We’re seeing something we didn’t expect to see so soon: the opening up to workers from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus,” said Tomasz Mogilski, vice president of Koelner Co., a Wroclaw-based construction tool maker. “Poland is becoming multiethnic.”

Most Poles wiring money home do not face the predicaments of their ancestors who ventured to the steel mills and factories of Pittsburgh and Baltimore a century ago, never to return. This is the era of instant messaging and budget airlines such as Whiz Air and Centralwings, which for $65 round trip can take you from Nottingham to Wroclaw in two hours.

This migration is also different from the post-World War II surge of Turks and North Africans who arrived in Germany, France and other countries. This is a shift within a continent, occurring at a sensitive moment when Europeans are perplexed about what exactly it means to be European. Does a Pole raised under communism and steeped in Catholicism fit into the new, secular Europe?

Such questions linger in the clattering corridors of Copernicus Airport.

When Piotr Tkacz, the former soldier, was discharged from the army two years ago, he saw few prospects in Poland. So he tucked 30 euros into his pocket, stuffed a dictionary into his backpack and headed to County Wicklow, Ireland.

“I started a new life,” said Tkacz, 26, who was returning home to visit his parents, wearing the best-polished shoes in the arrival hall. “It’s not true what they say in the newspapers though, that you just buy a plane ticket and land in Ireland for a golden life. It’s hard.”

In Ireland, he has been a housekeeper, chief cook and a waiter in a hotel. Now he’s training to be a bartender and attending computer and language schools. Tkacz has bought a car in Ireland and a house in Poland.

“I’ll be coming back home sometime,” he said. “In Poland, you work in the same factory for 20 years. But the Irish jump around from job to job. They put color in their resumes. I prefer Polish girls, though. In Ireland, a girl gets pregnant when she’s 16. She doesn’t get married. She goes to pubs. I like a more traditional girl.”

Wroclaw officials hope to use that loyalty to draw the younger generation back home, then take advantage of the experience gained abroad.

“Those who left Poland will come back,” said Mayor Dutkiewicz, who can switch a conversation from venture capital to Polish history in an instant. “They’ll be richer and wiser when they return. They’ll have a feeling for the way the world works.”

Romaszkan is the mayor’s man for this task. His team places ads in Polish-language newspapers in London and Dublin and has started a website, Wroclaw Now, that receives 10,000 visits a week from the Polish diaspora. Romaszkan also has an eye for demographics and a tongue for folklore.

“There are similarities between Poles and Brits,” he said. “We’re both fighters. The Brits like it that the Polish soldiers have stayed beside them in Iraq. And when it comes to the Irish, we share a history of vodka, potatoes and fighting for freedom. I think today 10% of Northern Ireland must be Poles. For the first time in 700 years, Irish Protestants and Catholics are coming together to stop Polish workers from stealing their girlfriends.”

In addition to bringing Poles home, Wroclaw officials know they must find ways to keep today’s students from joining them abroad. University enrollment is decreasing; 17,000 Wroclaw-area women are studying in Berlin, for instance. The city has reacted by recruiting students from Ukraine and other eastern countries.

“We need students. They’re a huge part of our economy,” Dutkiewicz said. “We’re open to multiculturalism. But this is a patriotic country and the meaning of such an impact is unknown.”

The other day, economics majors at Wroclaw University sat in a wood-paneled room beneath a mural of Christ. Bells pealed through the city. Musicians wearing tuxedos and carrying violins and cellos hurried to an oratorio. This was the Poland the students knew: Catholic, poor but sturdy. A place to wander from, maybe for months, maybe for years.

Katarzyna Godek intends to leave. “I have friends who have gone to Britain. They’re staying. They’ve found a higher quality of life, a more open society. One works in a bank, one’s a psychologist, two work in McDonald’s.

“It’s a decision that will change my life. Will I find a flat? A good job? I want to work in a bank. But could I stay away forever?” she wondered.

Krzysztof Zajaczkowski is staying. “For me, it’s impossible to change who I am. I am my Polish culture.” His friend Maciek Wisniewski, who plans to head to Norway, said it wasn’t a question of patriotism. “It’s the time and the chance to earn some good money and bring it back home.... These are the new economic realities.”

Copernicus Airport is a wrinkle in that reality.

The young lovers, Przebieracz and Dorociak, stood with duffel bags at their feet and backpacks on their shoulders. A man nearby hugged his child. His wife sat, fastening his suitcase in the sunlight. Some carried paper bags filled with home cooking, others wore suits normally slipped on only for village funerals and weddings. A loudspeaker crackled.

Przebieracz and Dorociak checked their passports. They found their line, shuffling in amid tight smiles and the scent of after-shave. They stepped toward the ticket counter and disappeared, bound first to Nottingham and then by car to Newark, where perhaps one day Romaszkan will find them in a pub or a church and bring them home.

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jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com

Times staff writer Ela Kasprzycka in Warsaw contributed to this report.