The presence of an extensive number of Polish immigrants in Ireland has a short history, which began after Poland’s accession to the EU. Therefore, the organizations that have been set up since 2004 were to a high degree built up with no or little impact of the existing tradition of immigrant structures and institutions. This makes Ireland a specific laboratory for testing a new model of immigrants’ organization of the 21st century. The article aims to describe the development of Polish immigrant organizations in Ireland and to present their characteristics, including their goals, activities, the role of new media and technology, as well as the patterns of participation and communication. The detailed presentation of these characteristics and case studies serves the goal of answering the question: if and to what extent “young” Polish immigrant organizations in Ireland can be seen as the forerunners of a new model of immigrants’ organization of the 21st century.

This paper draws on an anthropological perspective on social security to explore the complex ways in which Czech- and Slovak-speaking migrants living in Glasgow negotiated their healthcare concerns and built security in the city and beyond. It is based on 12 months of ethnographic research conducted in 2012 with migrants who moved to Glasgow after 2004. Inquiring into healthcare issues and the re-sulting insecurities from the migrants’ perspective and in their everyday lives, the paper demonstrates how these issues were largely informed by migrants’ experiences of ‘uncaring care’ in Glasgow, rather than due to their lack of knowledge or understanding of the Scottish/UK health system. Furthermore, the findings reveal how these migrants drew on multiple resources and forms of support and care – both locally and transnationally – in order to mitigate and overcome their health problems. At the same time, the analysis also highlights constraints and limitations to the actors’ care negotiations, thus going be-yond a functional approach to social security, which tends to overlook instances of ‘unsuccessful’ or unrealised care arrangements. In conclusion, I propose that migrants’ care negotiations can be best understood as an ongoing process of exploring potentialities of care by actively and creatively opening up, probing, rearranging and trying out sources of support and care in their efforts to deal with per-ceived risks and insecurities in their everyday lives.

The aim of this article is to provide an empirical test of the model of non-economic transfers by migrants such as values, attitudes, behaviours, lifestyles, transnational social networks, know-how, skills and knowledge. The first part of the article discusses the current state of Polish society, identifies the direc-tion of social change in Poland since 1989 and analyses the mutual dependency between social change and migration. The second section offers the analytical model and describes how existing empirical data from official statistics and research reports as well as the author’s own research projects have been analysed. The crucial element of the model is the notion of ‘closure’, defined as any factor that makes the migrants’ non-economic transfers difficult or impossible. Within each of the three categories of closure – socio-economic, cultural and psycho-social – more specific barriers to non-economic trans-fers are tested, e.g., lack of cohesive policy towards return migrants, social narratives on migration or ‘homecomer syndrome’. The analysis leads to the conclusion that, however difficult the measurement of the impact of return migration on social change at this stage, return migrants’ transfers are accelerating the process of social change in Poland towards the model of well-developed, post-modern Western societies, whereas closures impede this process.