Individual decisions and actions are conditioned by a set of factors operating at each stage of migration (Fawcett & Arnold 1987). One factor that influenced migration decisions of the interviewed Ukrainian women was Poland's changing administrative procedures for entry. As part of Poland's EU accession process, new legislation was introduced to comply with the acquis communaitaire. In 1997, a new act on aliens restricted entrance to Poland for citizens of the former Soviet Union, among them Ukrainian nationals. By 1998, the new laws were implemented and their effects were felt by Ukrainian migrants when crossing the Polish-Ukrainian border. The Aliens Act of 2003 brought new legal barriers to mobility, the most important being the introduction of a visa requirement. In the 1990s, access to the Polish labour market by foreigners was also limited by labour market regulations. The regulations in force (dating from 1994) required, among other things, that the employer pay a fee (equal to the current minimum monthly wage in Poland) for submitting an application for a work permit and justify the need to employ a foreigner.

Increasingly restrictive regulations regarding entrance and stay in Poland introduced between 1997 and 2003 have changed migrants’ exposure to risk. To balance the risks of the new legal context, migrants had to gain access to more resources as well as become involved in a complex interaction of different actors, such as migrant families and aquaintances, who could lend money for travel, other migrants, who are a source of information, Polish employers and representatives of Polish state authorities. To analyse this phenomenon, I use the notion of the migrant institution, by which I mean a complex communication of individuals and organisations that allows boundaries of social practice to stretch and interact in time and across international borders (Goss & Lindquist 1995: 319). In migrant institutions, communication and interaction takes place between the migrant and various actors.

Using the notion of the migrant institution, I analyse strategies the Ukrainian women employed to balance the risk related to irregular entrance, stay and undeclared work in Poland. I am interested in two complementary aspects of the problem.