Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

Polish Arbeitstouristen
Polish (im)migrants in Berlin 173
Unaffected national identities?
The number of undocumented Polish tourist-workers in Berlin has been estimated
at about 100,000 migrants annually. The majority of these migrants are Pendler/
innen, men and women with elementary and high-school education who move
back-and-forth across the border: they either work in the city during the week
and return home for the weekends (especially migrants from western parts of
Poland) or stay there for a few months, return home for a while after arranging for
temporary replacements at their Berlin workplaces, come back to the same or similar
jobs, and so on. 5
Polish Arbeitstouristen are concentrated in a few sectors of Berlin’s informal
labour market. Most men work in construction, predominantly in small firms
owned by native Germans, second-generation Italians (children of Gastarbeiters
from the 1950s–1960s), or longer-established Poles with legal immigrant status,
in ‘mache alles’ handyman jobs and as helpers in bars and restaurants owned mainly
by second-generation German Turks and Yugoslavs. Women find employment
mainly in German homes, usually several at the same time, as maids, baby-sitters
and caregivers for the elderly, and also in ethnic, especially Turkish, cafés and
restaurants, and as prostitutes. 6 From their earnings of 5–7 € per hour these
frugal tourist-workers manage to save 70–75% or 400–800 € per month, amounts
three to five times higher than the average incomes for men and women in
Poland. 7
These migrants come to the West, in this case, Berlin, ‘na saksy’ (this idiom,
originally used to refer to customary seasonal employment in Germany of hundreds
of thousands of Poles between 1890 and 1914, 8 is still used in contemporary Poland)
for the sole purpose of earning additional income for their families. Because of this
narrowly defined practical purpose of their Western sojourns and because as pendel
migrants they remain immersed in everyday affairs at home, Poland and their
hometowns there and, of particular concern here, their symbolic worlds, remain the
primary reference framework for these tourist-workers.
Long hours of exhausting work during their Berlin sojourns, the only means
of realising the goals that brought them there, and unfamiliarity with the German
language make social relations with Germans and participation in German culture
nearly impossible. In addition, political insecurity related to migrants’ undocumented
status and their resulting permanent fear of harassment and deportation
combined with the hostility or, at best, indifference of German public opinion
toward them significantly contribute to the multiple marginalisation of these touristworkers
during their Berlin sojourns.
In the situation of multiple but transitory marginalisation, which does not
interfere with their lives in Poland and does not prevent the realisation of their goals
in Berlin (unless, of course, they are caught and deported), Polish Arbeitstouristen, my
respondents believed, ‘do not have much curiosity about the world’. Their German
sojourns ‘do not alter their traditional [home-country] national identities’, and ‘the
idea of Europe and feeling European does not even enter their minds’. 9