‘It’s about mindset’. How do young migrants in Poland build their resilience?

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to investigate how young migrants’ resilience manifests in different spheres of their lives. Adapting the Keck and Sakdapolrak's framework, we define resilience as being comprised of coping, adaptive and transformative capacities. While coping capacities are a post-crisis short-term response, adaptive and transformation capacities encompass more proactive and long-term planning. Drawing on interviews with young Third Country Nationals living in Poland, conducted within the framework of H2020 project MIMY, we analyse how the different types of resilience capacities intersect with different areas of integration. We also highlight that resilience is not only the ability to bounce back, but also the power to bounce forward, which implies the capacity to transform individual lives and their environments. Interestingly, in young migrants’ narratives their personal resources, such as a positive mindset, persistence etc. play a crucial role. While community resources (family support and social capital) were mentioned, structural opportunities were largely absent in their narratives on resilience. Therefore, we can talk about a process of (self-)responsibilization of migrants for integration, which relates to the neoliberal discourse on newcomers’ self-reliance.

KEYWORDS:

• Young migrants
• resilience
• resilience capacities
• well-being of migrants
• integration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Competing interest

No potential competing interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 At the beginning of 2022, the number of Ukrainians in Poland had been estimated at around 1.3–1.5 million (Duszczyk et al. 2023), while the combined number of foreigners from all other countries was over 800 thousand. A few months later, after the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022, the number of Ukrainians living in Poland has risen to an unprecedented level of approx. 3.5 million. Russia's aggression against Ukraine has caused massive movements of war refugees (Duszczyk and Kaczmarczyk 2022). A year after Russia's full-scale attack on Ukraine, 1 million Ukrainian citizens, mainly women and children, have temporary protection in Poland. A total of 1.4 million people has valid residence permits (the data does not include people staying in Poland under visa-free travel or based on visas) (Gov.pl 2023). Economic migrants, characteristic of the previous wave of migration from Ukraine to Poland and recently forced migrants from Ukraine faced different opportunity structures resulting from the national support system. The latter group benefited from more comprehensive support and various development opportunities, while the former group experienced limited options shaped mainly by economic and labor policies.

2 Regarding migration trends to Poland, we observe a progressive feminization. Female migrants actively engage in various labor-market sectors and participate in social and cultural activities within the host community. Additionally, entrepreneurship has emerged as a solution for them to avoid discriminatory practices in the labor market (Homel 2022; Andrejuk 2018). Hence, the sample in Part 3 primarily consisted of women.

3 All parts of the study were completed before Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

Additional information

Funding

The paper is a result of the project ‘EMpowerment through liquid Integration of Migrant Youth in vulnerable conditions’ (MIMY). MIMY has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation funding programme under Grant Agreement No. 870700. Open Access of this publication has been supported by a grant from the Faculty of Management and Social Communication under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University.