Chapters Two and Three looked at the economic push factors that help explain migration from contemporary Poland. However, decisions to migrate are also influenced by non-economic factors in the sending locality, such as the climate of opinion regarding migration. This climate of opinion can be conceptualised as a ‘migration culture’. As defined in Chapter One, migration cultures are conventions about why and how people should migrate, which people should migrate and where they should go, as well as views about whether or not migration is a normal and sensible way of making a living, and about the costs and benefits of migration for the whole local community. By knowing the migration culture one can better understand decisions that may seem irrational from a strictly financial point of view. For example, one interviewee's husband was unemployed in Grajewo but reluctant to work in Germany, despite the efforts of the local job centre to help in this regard. He was still hoping for an American visa even though he had already been refused one six times. He stated bluntly, “In the west of Poland they go to Germany, here in the east we go to the USA.”

The examples of migration cultures in this chapter and Chapter Five are drawn primarily from Grajewo and Sanok, but this does not imply that the towns are identical, still less that they are typical of all of Poland. Elrick argues that ‘it is preferable to speak of “cultures” of migration, which evolve in different geographical contexts, and not just a single, national “culture” of migration’. Clearly, different Polish localities have different cultures, as illustrated by the case studies in Elrick's article, where one village had a long tradition of international migration and the other did not. Nonetheless, there is no reason to suppose that Sanok and Grajewo are untypical of other Polish places where migration has become a way of life, and their migration cultures do have common features linked to the high incidence of migration.