'Home, (bitter)sweet home’. Voices of post-EU enlargement returnees to Poland

Abstract

This study examines the various discourses surrounding the return to Poland of migrants who left the country following accession to the EU in 2004. The data, which was analysed from the perspectives of discourse and narrative, stemmed from two complementary research projects. The first netnographic study examined a number of entries on an internet forum triggered by newspaper reports and articles related to (re)migration and published in the online issues of the ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’ since 2004. The data gathered from online media was coupled with semi-structured interviews with returnees collected during an ethnographic project conducted in 2013–14. The analysis revealed two distinctive themes: a tendency to complain about the home country upon return and the prospect of remigration. This chapter will attempt to explain how discourses of migration, return and remigration are thematically linked with – and at the same time contextualized in – post-communist transition, as well as how the micro-level of individual/semi-private stories feeds into general patterns of (re)migration to post-communist European countries.