Thread: Return trip-many Chicago pole immg. returning back to Poland

Return trip
Many Poles who once flocked to Chicago are going back to Poland. Life may be kinder there than here.

When Poles dreamt of America, more often than not they dreamt of Chicago. A Piotr and Aneta, a Polish couple now in their 30s, had a very specific ream of Chicago when they arrived here in 2004. A They saw it as the place where their education—both have advanced degrees in engineering—could provide them with more opportunities than they would ever find in Poland. A Within two years, they had saved enough money here to open their own small company. But since then, their Chicago dream has soured, and now they are thinking of returning to Poland. A "For the future of our children," Piotr explains over coffee at a suburban Starbucks. He and Aneta share a look of resignation. "We are happy here, and lucky also. But probably we will have to go back," he says. A Their departure may not seem like a big deal, but it signals a seismic shift in one of the major forces that has shaped Chicago from it earliest days.

As recently as 2000, Poles were second only to Mexicans in the number of new immigrants settling in the city. But this historic tide has turned. In the last few years, Immigration from Poland has been reduced to a trickle of perhaps a few hundred newcomers a year. And during this same period, something else happened, something no one anticipated or even believed possible: unprecedented numbers of Poles have started to pack up and return to Poland. No precise figures exist, but one reliable estimate puts the number of returnees at 50,000 since 2004.

Three factors are driving the trend. The first is that since 2004, Poland has been a member of the European Union. This opened a rich vein of opportunity for job-seeking Poles who can now work pretty much anywhere they want in the EU. An estimated one million Polish citizens have taken advantage of this to find employment in Britain and Ireland. The second factor is the robust health of the Polish economy, which up until the global economic downturn of the last few months had been humming along at an annual growth rate of 6 percent.

The third factor is the stepped up enforcement of U.S. Immigration law, now the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security, which since 9/11 has made life very uncomfortable for people like Piotr and Aneta.



The couple (whose last name is being withheld because of their uncertain legal status) arrived at O'Hare four years ago on tourist visas, which they planned to change to student visas once they enrolled in courses to improve their English.

"We came to America for better jobs," explains Piotr, who wears his hair tied back in a neat ponytail. "With my skills in Poland, I would make about 800 zloty ($250) a month. That's just the way it is."

They zeroed in on Chicago because Aneta's brother had some friends here.

"They helped us. Right away we had our own apartment, a car and a telephone to look for jobs," he says.

Aneta spent one day working as a cleaning lady before she found a job as a draftsman; Piotr spent three months in construction before landing work as a surveyor. Within two years, they had put together enough money to open an engineering business that works with architects and contractors on small residential jobs.

Just before their first daughter was born, they moved out of what Aneta fondly calls "our beautiful basement" in Uptown and rented a house in the suburbs. Their second daughter was born in October.

The only problem was the student visa. They couldn't get one. Before 9/11, it was fairly routine for Poles to convert six-month tourist visas into long-term student visas. And if you happened to overstay on a tourist visa, Immigration authorities didn't make a big fuss. Not anymore. These days, they will come to your house and arrest you. Even if you leave the U.S. of your own accord, you will likely be barred from returning for 10 years.

With two small children to think of, Piotr and Aneta say they are afraid. With little hope of gaining legal status (despite the fact that their children are U.S. citizens), they are asking themselves what's the point. "We don't have health insurance, we don't have Social Security. We pay all the taxes, but we get nothing in return," says Piotr.

The couple plan to give it a few more months. Perhaps the new Obama administration will signal a more sympathetic approach to Immigration. If not, they will go back to Poland.

"This is a very common story," says Zygmunt Matynia, Poland's consul general in Chicago. "There are a lot more deportations now, and because of this a lot of people are returning voluntarily. The process of deportation is very unpleasant. People are treated like prisoners. They are handcuffed and humiliated. This I don't like—the criminalization of the process."

Last year, Chicago's Polish community was stunned by the harsh treatment of Janina Wasilewski, a Schiller Park housewife and mother, who was deported to Poland after 18 years in the U.S. She entered the U.S. legally in 1989 and was almost certainly entitled to stay, but after a maddening series of legal miscues—some her fault, some not—she was forced to leave and barred from returning for 10 years. Meanwhile, her husband, a fellow Polish émigré who came at the same time, was granted U.S. citizenship three months after his wife's deportation. He remains here and is fighting to get his wife's ruling reversed.

Father Tadeusz Dzieszko, pastor of St. Constance Parish in Jefferson Park, where a large Polish community still thrives, says the deportations have become unsettlingly commonplace.

He tells the story of one of his parishioners, the mother of a 4-year-old child, who was recently arrested and jailed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (ICE). "They came at 5 a.m. and took her away in handcuffs. She was illegal only because her sponsor had died. Her husband had a different sponsor so he was OK," he says.

"It reminds us of communist times. They (ICE) can do whatever they want," says the priest, who came to Chicago to complete his seminary studies 25 years ago.

Of the 350,000 illegal aliens deported by ICE last year, 500 were Poles. Gail Montenegro, spokeswoman for the ICE's Chicago office, said she took exception to the allegations of harsh treatment. "ICE takes its responsibility to enforce the nation's Immigration laws seriously and carries out this mandate in a fair, humane manner," she said in a statement.

But ICE's Chicago office seemed to acknowledge the complaints last August when it launched an experimental self-deportation program that offered illegal aliens a chance to leave the country without first being arrested and jailed. There were few takers.



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The story of Chicago's Polish connection begins in 1831, the year an unsuccessful uprising in Poland—one of many against a perpetual plague of foreign occupiers—was crushed. Anticipating a surge of exiles, President Andrew Jackson set aside 22,040 acres of land along the Rock River in northern Illinois for a Polish settlement. That plan didn't fly, but it did put Chicago on the map for the first wave of what eventually became a great tide of Immigration.

Over the next 100 years, nearly half a million Poles would make their way to Chicago. They became the city's biggest ethnic constituency, and Chicago rightly claimed to be the largest Polish city after Warsaw.

The Poles kept coming after World War II, but their numbers were easily eclipsed by African-Americans and Latinos. Still, with census figures showing 821,000 people of Polish or Polish-American ancestry currently living in the metropolitan area, Chicago retains its status as the second-largest Polish city.

And the Poles have left their mark. In many respects, Poles and other Eastern Europeans built the city and defined its character. They gave Chicago its heft and its famous broad shoulders, working in its steel mills and stockyards for as long as those jobs lasted. They bought homes, built churches and schools and stayed in the city's working-class neighborhoods after most of the others had left. They eagerly cast themselves into the melting pot. They dreamed the American Dream for their children and grandchildren, and for the most part saw it realized



Chicago, in turn, has left its mark on Poland. During my time as the Tribune's Warsaw correspondent in the mid-1990s, I visited villages in Poland, particularly in the southern highlands, where every single household had some tangible connection to Chicago—either someone in the family was currently working in Chicago, had recently returned from working in Chicago, or was about to depart for a job in Chicago. This was not the most prosperous part of Poland—far from it—but, incongruously, the houses here tended to be much larger and fancier than anywhere else in the country, the result of dollars earned in Chicago. There are, of course, Polish communities in New York, Detroit, Cleveland and everyplace else in the industrial northeast where jobs were once abundant, but none of these places approaches the special significance of Chicago in the Polish mind.

In Detroit and Cleveland, when the industrial base dried up, so too did the stream of Polish Immigration. And when the immigrants stopped coming, the local Polish communities lost their vitality. In Chicago, the community is still vibrant, fueled by a more or less continuous stream of immigrants that only now is coming to an end. Chicago still boasts two Polish language daily newspapers, a dozen weeklies, three radio stations and a TV station. The Polish jazz, art and cinema scene remains one of the city's undiscovered treasures. Mass is still offered in Polish in 51 parishes that stretch from the old ethnic enclaves along Milwaukee Avenue to the far reaches of suburbia, and the pews are packed. Even more telling—some 17,000 youngsters are enrolled in local Polish Saturday schools, maintaining language skills that will enable them to stay in touch in grandparents back in Poland, or to matriculate at top-rank Polish universities, which cost much less than their U.S. counterparts.

The Polish community in Chicago is richly variegated, the cumulative product of distinct waves of Immigration. The first, which gathered force in the late 19th Century and kept coming until the Great Depression, was overwhelmingly poor, uneducated and hungry for any work that would put food on the table. A second wave followed World War II. These were mainly refugees displaced by the war, or by Poland's redrawn borders, or by well-founded fears of remaining in a country that had come under Soviet domination. Next came the Solidarity generation of the 1970s and 1980s, generally better-educated than their predecessors and eager to escape the grinding struggle between the anti-communist Solidarity trade union movement and an increasingly repressive regime.

The most recent wave—and what now looks to be the final wave—calls itself the post-Solidarity generation. Typically, they are young and self-confident, the beneficiaries of their parents' triumph over the old order. They regard a passport and the freedom to travel as a birthright. If previous generations arrived on these shores hat in hand, this new generation has come with college degrees in its pocket.

Gosia Sztwiertnia is of this generation. Fresh out of university, she came to Chicago for three weeks of adventure in the summer of 1997 and hasn't left yet.

"I just wanted to explore," she explains. She easily found work, and also employers willing to sponsor her. This enabled her to get a green card. She now has her own business as a freelance translator, working mainly for the Cook County court system.

She takes classes at Columbia College Chicago and in the evenings she's a jazz singer. Her style fuses American jazz with Latin rhythms. Her pianist, sax player and drummer are Poles; her bassist is from Israel. Only her guitarist is American.

"The people I play with, they are all doing great on the Chicago scene. It's a great opportunity here, workwise and moneywise. And it's very good for artistic inspiration," says Sztwiertnia, who is now 34 and speaks flawless English with a slight Slavic lilt.

"I have lots of friends in Poland who would come tomorrow, but they can't. Things got really difficult with visas after 9/11," she says.

Unlike previous generations of immigrants, Sztwiertnia did not move into one of the city's traditional Polish enclaves when she first arrived. "To be honest, I have to say I'm a little embarrassed by the ones who come here and don't (assimilate) and don't move from the neighborhood. I don't like to associate myself with kielbasa and pierogies and all of this going to church. There are different sides to the community here," she says.

Six years ago, Sztwiertnia met and married Daniel Petr, a Czech who immigrated to Chicago the year after her. He's an artist who works in metal. He also runs a small construction company.

"I love my life here," she says. "All good things happened to me here."

In a few weeks she will become a U.S. citizen, giving her dual citizenship. "But I am still 100 percent Polish. I feel that I am a Pole living in America. I love this city and the people and country," she says. "But someday I know we will go back to Poland."

Sztwiertnia embodies a new kind of Polish immigrant. For Poles of earlier generations, coming to the U.S. implied a permanent commitment. Practically and psychologically, the New World and the Old World were a wide ocean apart. But in the age of globalization, a bright young Pole who comes to Chicago in search of a more interesting lifestyle is really not much different from the bright young person who comes to Chicago from a small town in Iowa with the same intentions.

Monika Starczuk came to Chicago because she won the lottery. Not the Illinois Lottery, but the far more life-rearranging roll of the dice known officially as the Immigrant Visa Diversity Program—or, more commonly, the green card lottery. Each year, the U.S. holds a global drawing for 50,000 green cards. On years when Poland is eligible, up to 3 million people sign up for a chance to win one of the 5,000 slots allocated to Poland.

Starczuk, 32, comes from a small town near the Ukrainian border and has a degree in political science from Warsaw University. Like Sztwiertnia, with whom she is friends, Starczuk is another citizen of the world; she would be happy in Dublin or Dubai. But she has chosen America and Chicago.

"This country gives young people many more chances to be independent than you would have in Poland," she says.

"When I first came, I was buying Polityka (a popular news magazine in Poland) every week. But I stopped two years ago. Same with Polish TV; I don't watch anymore," she explains. "I made a choice—to be part of this country, to be a part of the American fabric."

For the last two years, she has been working as a community organizer for the Albany Park Neighborhood Council, helping Polish, Latino and other immigrant groups understand their rights and become U.S. citizens. At the same time, she has been polishing her own natural talents as a networker.

Most of her friends here are fellow Poles, and almost all of them have university degrees. The problem is that many of them are now here illegally.



"They don't think of themselves as illegal, because they came in legally. But it really is a problem," she says.

"Two of my very good friends just left because they couldn't take [the uncertainty] anymore. She had a degree in pharmacology but was working as a baby-sitter; he had a degree in economics but worked in a store that sold car parts. They were here for eight years, but they lacked legal status. They still own a condo here—which of course they can't sell—but they decided that this golden cage in America is not for them anymore. I think when people like that go, it's a net loss for the U.S.," she says.

Agnes Ptasznik neatly bridges the last two waves of Polish migration. She was conceived in Poland a few months before martial law was imposed by communist authorities in 1981, but was born in Chicago.

"My parents had a rough time leaving. My mother hid the fact that she was pregnant. She was afraid they wouldn't give her a passport," says Ptasznik. Her father, an electrical engineer, had to repay the Polish government the cost of his education before he was allowed an exit visa.

Although she grew up in Chicago, Ptasznik's first language was Polish. "I learned English from 'Mister Rogers' and 'Sesame Street,' " she says.

Ptasznik now works as a community outreach specialist with the Illinois attorney general's office. She attends John Marshall Law School in the evening.

While she retains her fluency in Polish and her Polish passport, Ptasznik has crossed the invisible line of personal national identity. The moment came last August when her parents visited Poland and decided to buy a cemetery plot there.

The news upset Ptasznik. "How often do you think I'm going to be able to go to Poland and visit your grave?" she asked her mother. The thought of resting in an unvisited grave also seemed to upset her mother.

There are still neighborhoods in Chicago where you can live in a completely Polish cocoon. You can shop for Polish food products in a sklep, buy flowers at the kwiaciarnia, bread at the piekarnia, and get your hair cut at a salon fryzjerski. You can do your banking in Polish, read Polish newspapers and listen to ultra-Catholic Radio Maryja beamed straight from Warsaw. "The only difference between here and there is the color of the currency," says Starczuk, the community organizer.

But these days, the old Polish corridor that stretches along Milwaukee Avenue is looking a little frayed. Many of the Polish families who used to live in the tidy bungalows that line the residential streets have moved out to the suburbs. Others have gone back to Poland. The bungalows are still tidy, but now they are occupied by Mexicans. In the front windows, Our Lady of Czestochowa has been replaced by Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Anna Klocek, a real estate agent, knows these streets well and has a sharp eye for signs of transition.

"Look at all these suitcases on sale," she says, indicating a sidewalk sale outside a shop on Milwaukee Avenue. "It means that Poles are leaving.

"And look over there," she says, nodding toward a restaurant on the other side of the street. "It looks like they just remodeled, so probably they are planning to stay."

She also has taken note of the unusual frequency of "for sale" signs on the residential streets, and the names on the mailboxes, which are mostly Polish.

This, she explains, is the Polish connection to the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Polish immigrants have a long tradition of home-buying—their way of staking a claim in the New World. So when offered a chance to buy a home for no money down and token payments for the first few years, it was hard for these immigrants to say no.

Now they are saying goodbye.

"It wasn't a calculated move on their part," says Klocek. "They really wanted this American Dream. And the real estate agents were pushing them; the mortgage brokers were pushing them. Everybody was making money until the market collapsed.

"So they have no equity in the house—they look at it as paying rent for 10 years; and they look at Poland, which is doing well, and they say, 'Forget it, we're not making it here, we'll leave.' Especially if one partner is not here legally," she says.

We are walking in the area known locally as Jackowo (after St. Hyacinth Church—Swiety Jacek in Polish—the neighborhood's dominant landmark). "This is where my generation came to find work and to get help getting settled," explains Klocek, 44, who came on a student visa in 1987.

She found work as a cleaner, a baby-sitter, a waitress. In between, she took business courses at Truman College, got a real estate license, married a fellow Pole, moved to Jefferson Park and gave birth to four children.



On a recent weekday, we slide into a booth at the Red Apple, a Milwaukee Avenue landmark where the $9.99 lunch special invites you to stuff yourself with unlimited quantities of pork-centric Polish dishes. The topic turned to politics.

Immigrants of Klocek's generation—the Solidarity generation—tend to be uninterested in American national politics, and completely oblivious to local politics. But they are passionately opinionated about Polish politics. These are the people who line up outside the Polish Consulate on Lake Shore Drive to cast a ballot in Poland's elections.

Klocek doesn't fit the pattern. Not only does she vote in local elections, last year she ran for alderman in the 45th Ward. She lost, but she plans to try again.

"I was unhappy with the way things were going in my ward so I decided to run myself," she explains. The only disappointment, she says, was lack of support from Polish community organizations.

"We don't have leaders in the Polish community anymore. We have old guys who like to go to banquets, eat big dinners and hand out awards to each other. But they can't elect anybody to anything.

"It's not that we need a Polish agenda in City Hall, but we do need Polish candidates because it pulls the Polish community into the civic life of our city and state. Latinos are doing much better," she says.

Not so long ago, it was different. Rostenkowski, Derwinski and Pucinski were brand names on the Chicago and national political scene.

Polish political activism petered out in the late '70s and early '80s, and it took a leap off the cliff in the '90s," says Mark Dobrzycki, 46, a second-generation Polish-American whose father fought with the Free Polish Army at Monte Cassino before immigrating to Chicago in the 1950s.

Dobrzycki learned Polish at home, but speaks English with the accent of the lifelong Chicago inhabitant he is. He graduated from Weber High and won a scholarship to Northwestern. He runs a legal aid clinic on Milwaukee Avenue that mainly serves Polish immigrants. These days he deals with a lot of visa issues.

"I tell them, you want Poland to be in the Visa Waiver Program, get involved here, elect a congressman here," he says, referring to the program that allows citizens of some 30 friendly countries to enter the U.S. without a visa.

Polish community groups are abundant, but lack clout. Old-line organizations like the Polish American Association and the Polish National Alliance (basically an insurance company) seem increasingly out of touch, relics of an earlier era. "I feel like I'm the only one from my generation—the generation whose parents came after World War II—who is still involved. When you try to get involved, they tell you you're too young," says Dobrzycki.

Aurelia Pucinski is a Cook County Circuit Court judge and the daughter of Roman Pucinski, the U.S. congressman and Chicago alderman who died in 2002. As an elected official, she has her own theory about why recent Polish immigrants shun politics:

"The Solidarity generation grew up under communism and that's the only thing they know. They are a little harder, a little flintier, they don't trust government, they don't believe what they read in the newspapers. If you ask a Polish mother if her son should grow up to be a carpenter or an alderman, she will always say a carpenter.

"And the new generation, the young people that have come in the last few years, they are not interested in politics. The new generation is expecting to stay here, but they are not really expecting to be American," she says.

It is hard to imagine that this country will ever again see anything like the great tide of humanity that came to Chicago from the eastern reaches of Europe in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Too much in the world has changed. Poland's borders within Europe are finally secure and its economy has started to prosper. Gazeta Wyborcza, the major national newspaper in Poland, recently ran a story questioning America's "relevance" as an employment destination for Poles. Or as Father Dzieszko of St. Constance put it: "Poles still want to come, but they are coming for vacations or for shopping."

At the same time, the U.S. has grown uneasy about accepting newcomers, its borders paradoxically sealed to those who want to play by the rules and disturbingly permeable for those who don't.

Not much can be done about the tectonic shifts of history or demography, but if Chicago expects to maintain its status as a global city, a few tweaks could at least keep a steady stream of talented young Poles coming to the city; small numbers, but enough to make sure the community remains a living, evolving thing.

"Maybe Obama will change things," says Piotr, the engineer from the beginning of this story. "We are hoping."

One easy step would be to include Poland in the Visa Waiver Program. Matynia, the consul general, has argued that Poland's continued exclusion was a needless point of contention that risked alienating a loyal ally in Eastern Europe and caused a lot of hurt closer to home. Last October, the Bush administration expanded the program to include the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Lithuania and several other Eastern Europe countries—Poland's neighbors, but not Poland. Poles still have to apply for an entry visa, pay a $100 fee and have no guarantee that a visa will be granted even after they fork over the money. This places a severe crimp on tourism, commerce and routine family visits.

"It's very unfair," says Matynia, pointing out that Poland was one of the Bush administration's staunchest allies in Iraq.

Judge Pucinski suggested that the Department of Homeland Security could ease up in its heavy-handed pursuit of visa violators, especially those who clearly pose no threat to national security. The 5 a.m. raids, she says, "are creating all this fear in the community; it's not the right way to go about it."

Starczuk, the community organizer, is doing her part to get young Poles involved in the political process. Last year, she and several friends organized a group called the Young Polish Initiative. Their goal is to groom Polish-American candidates to run for public office, recruit others to work for them and register the rest to vote for them.

"We understand that if we are not active voters, nobody pays attention to us," she says.

Or listen to Walter Kotaba, who immigrated to Chicago as a 17-year-old in 1960, worked on an assembly line and put himself through University of Illinois-Chicago before launching himself into business. He built a successful shipping company from scratch; he also owns four ethnic radio stations in Chicago, two in New York and two more in Florida. He has an accountant's eye for the bottom line and makes his case with Chicago-style bluntness:

"Everybody knows the people of Poland and Eastern Europe are fantastic employees. People in their 20s—they're industrious, smart, educated and you can get them for nothing," he says. "Instead of exporting our businesses to China, why don't we let these people come here? That way all the brains and infrastructure stay in America."


http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/ ... ory?page=1

The couple (whose last name is being withheld because of their uncertain legal status) arrived at O'Hare four years ago on tourist visas, which they planned to change to student visas once they enrolled in courses to improve their English

They can get student visas just for going to school to learn English?????

"The New Generation is expecting to stay here, BUT THEY ARE NOT REALLY EXPECTED TO BE AMERICAN...."