In the period 1950* 2020, international migration in Europe changed significantly. One of the most char-- acteristic features was the change in net migration from negative to positive. At the beginning of the twenty first century, Poland belonged to the minority of countrie s in this respect that is, it experienced strong emigration but only minor immigration. However, migration in Poland has also been changing. In the second decade of this century, the outflow of people has weakened, the inflow of migrants has increased an d the migration balance has become positive. I analyse these phenomena from the theoretical perspective of the migration transition that was experienced in the second half of the twentieth century by most countries in Western, Northern and Southern Europe. I attempt to answer the question of whether the latest migration phenomena prove that this transition is also occurring in Poland. In conclusion, I argue that the available toKeywords: migra date evidence provides an affirmative answer to this question.

The article offers a new perspective on contemporary and past migration processes in the post-Soviet area by testing the usefulness of the concept of a migration cycle for the Russian case. By adopting the longue durée approach, we attempt to assess the advancement of Russia’s migration cycle, arguing at the same time that it constitutes an interesting, yet not an obvious case with which to test the utility of the concept. We postulate that, in tracking Russia’s migration trajectories in pre-1991 times, it is im-portant to account for both the flows between Russia as the-then state entity (i.e. the Tsarist Empire, later the Soviet Union) and foreign countries and the flows between Russia as the core of the empire and its eastern and southern peripheries. Our analyses show that while – taking into account statistical consid-erations – Russia has undoubtedly already undergone the migration transition, it has not yet reached the stage of a mature immigration country. We also contend that migration transition for Russia occurred internally – within the-then state borders – and revealed itself with its transformation from a Soviet re-public into a federative state.

Qualitative migration researchers today often use one or more of three concepts – mobility, transnationalism and integration – to make sense of the complexities of contemporary migrants’ lives. Collectively, researchers identify these as the three fundamental characteristics of migranthood. Being a migrant is about, for example, planning return visits, maintaining (or not maintaining) relations with people in the sending country or being preoccupied with learning to speak the receiving-society majority language. Qualitative interviewing suggests that each migrant is uniquely situated along various mobility, transnational and integration continuums. Migrants have many social identities as well as migranthood and the existence of these other, intersecting, social identities (such as social class, lifestage and gender) helps to determine their location on the continuums: for example, how often they are mobile and how much they can be mobile. The article draws on interviews in Poland with Ukrainians and Polish return migrants to show how (former) migrants conceptualise shared Ukrainian-Polish migranthood along these three continuums.

Ukraine remains today one of the main migrant sending countries in Europe, with thousands of Ukrainians working in Czechia, Italy, Poland and Russia. In this regard, Ukraine shares the previous experience of Central European countries such as the Baltic States, Poland and Slovakia, that in the 1990s and early 2000s registered first temporary, and later permanent, outflows. In more recent years, however, many Central and Eastern European countries started to register increasing numbers of immigrants and some of them have switched from net sending to net receiving migration regimes. The objective of this article is to discuss the possibility of a similar turnaround in Ukraine; to this end, we investigate the main quantitative data on mi-gration from and to Ukraine, and interpret this information in the light of selected theoretical approaches that have been used to explain migration in Central and Eastern Europe. The available data reveal high levels of labour emigration of both temporary and permanent character, the increasing propensity of mi-grants to settle down in the host countries, and the growing involvement of the youngest cohorts in the emi-gration. Despite this evidence we argue that the current situation by no means constitutes a premise for reversing the outflow from Ukraine. We conclude that the most recent improvements in general economic indicators will not lead to high levels of immigration without an active labour market policy towards foreigners.