UK, Ireland /
First proper "Polish" School in the UK - The Next Stage of Ghettoisation [283]
Its a numbers game. If a similar number of Germans or Dutch entered the country, as the number of Poles, people would complain about them instead. Plus, a lot of Poles get marred to non EU citizens. Then the non EU citizen can bring its family over too. Thus, you get a double whammy.
True - but that only means that you can't fairly compare the Germans or Dutch to Poles - because of the scale.
Poor old Magdalena is a tiny minority arguing for the rest of the clan
No, she is not.
But it's all a catch22.
There are two basic things that Polish people need to be able to do before they get accepted in any local circles.
First, a Polish person has to speak fairly good English before any English people will accept you. This is absolutely normal - I work with foreigners from all over the world and know how frustrating it can be to constantly make effort to understand someone and communicate with them.
Then, once they made some effort and learnt to communicate, they still have to have some money to socialize with the English (unfortunately lots of Polish people fail here, either due to fact that they earn less or due to their priorities).
Unfortunately - it takes time to learn English. Polish people have naturally low confidence level, so unless they are comfortable with their level of English, they stick to their own circles - which makes learning worse. In the end, they stop learning altogether and don't improve their communication, which in turn means that their English will not be good enough for English people to communicate with them fairly effortlessly (and those even stand a chance to be accepted). This means, that they will continue staying with their old circles, establishing Polish communities and kinder-gardens etc.
Many people went through the whole process and are now at different level. Possibly got married to English. Have good jobs. They might be a minority, but I wouldn't say a tiny minority.
Another thing - some people see UK only as a place of work, not home. They are there for a year or two and want to return home. Sometimes they don't, but UK is still not seen as home. This does not encourage integration.
