Polska

My 1st encounter with the Poles on this trip didn’t occur in Poland but on the drunken night bus in London at 3 o’clock in the morning journeying from Covent Gardens back to the flat in Brixton. A verbal brawl had ensued between an Englishman and a group of Poles. The latter wishing that the Poles would show more respect for the country that gives them refuge in their expatriation. You see, unemployment is rampant in Poland. Meanwhile, the London economy is booming. Poles, with their EU passports, stream into the city like wetbacks over the Rio Grande-O. But legally. Legal or illegal, it seems that people feel endangered by the different, yet the economy pushes the world’s citizens into a perpetual state of nomadism that ignores borders, both legal and cultural. They are simply looking for the next place where they can struggle to survive. Economic migration is at the heart of the European identity as much as it is in North America and it is changing the way that we think about each other.