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Until the late 1980s, Central and Eastern Europe was a region relatively isolated from the other parts of the world, and foreign travel was administratively restricted. The freedom of movement reinstated in the region around 1990 led to massive migration. However, instead of acceleration of the highly selective outflow of ethnic minorities, political opponents and elites, which predominated past movements or westbound exodus feared at the time the transition to democracy began, quite new and partly unexpected phenomena occurred. Those phenomena included: an unprecedented intensification of international flows within Central and Eastern Europe, an influx of people from outside the region, and illegal transit migration. In the 1990s, migration in the region reflected, and will continue to do so, the interplay of three different kinds of imbalances: demographic, economic, and political whose clear outcome is the persistence of a latent potential for emigration.

Until the beginning of the 1990s Poland did not receive foreign migrants. Thereafter, the situation changed dramatically. A large part of the inflow proved to be illegal migrants, many of whom were in transit to Western Europe. Although these movements gradually declined in the second half of the decade, some became increasingly identified with relatively sophisticated smuggling of people. Foreigners smuggled from the South to the West, together with the international criminal networks assisting them, became typical of the migratory movements of people in Central and Eastern Europe during the 1990s. This article seeks to describe illegal migration from the perspective of Poland, a country often perceived as a major transit area in the smuggling of persons to Western Europe. The conclusions draw on the findings of several surveys recently carried out in Poland. Basic concepts related to illegal migration are defined and juxtaposed, and various myths and stereotypes concerning it that most often stem from the paucity of empirical evidence are examined. Finally, the trends observed in Poland are interpreted within the larger context of contemporary European migration.

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