This book explores factors which help determine Polish families’ decisions about how long to stay in the UK, and therefore, by implication, whether and when to return to Poland. Chapters Eight and Nine discussed some of the reasons why such families had integrated, or, alternatively, felt excluded and therefore less settled in England. This chapter considers interviewees’ opinions about returns, both to live in Poland and for holidays which help shape thoughts about longer-term or permanent return.

The chapter opens with some general thoughts about return migration and then looks more specifically at the scale and patterns of contemporary return migration to Poland. Discussion then turns to interviewees’ perceptions about how many people were returning, and the permanence or otherwise of that return. This is followed by an exploration of how migrants think about the duration of their stay, including the changeability of their plans. Finally, and most importantly, the chapter looks at their perceptions of Poland and of their potential livelihoods in Poland as compared to their actual livelihoods in the UK.

Return and migrant mobility

‘In most migration theories … the assumption is that human beings are inherently sedentary.’ The origin country is ‘the place where one fits in … and has an unproblematic culture and individual or collective identity’. Return, therefore, is easily visualised in normative terms, as a good thing, the return to normality. This links to the traditional understanding of return as the completion of the migration process. It can be seen as a happy ending, although, since Cerase's influential 1974 article, scholars have often also noted the phenomenon of the ‘return of failure’. The Polish interviews suggested that to some extent these perceptions continue, with migration attempts classified as ending either in success or failure. However, migration scholarship today tends to take the opposite approach. The literature on transnationalism, mentioned in Chapter One, draws attention to frequent travel to and fro as a key aspect of ‘the multiplicity of migrants’ involvements in both the home and host societies’.