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Poland has faced several crisis situations related to migration in the past decade. With differences in the scale and origins of incoming people, these crises have triggered various reactions from Polish policy-makers, from the welcoming of non-EU migrants to the implementation of restrictive measures at the Polish border. The present research uses a discursive approach to study the ways in which non-EU migrants are presented and discussed in Poland. By comparing official discourses from Polish authorities during the 2015–2016 migration crisis, the 2021 border crisis with Belarus and following the Russian war on Ukraine in 2022, we analyse how different groups of non-EU migrants are discursively described and considered by political figures. Furthermore, as these crises have important links with the European Union (EU), we also investigate how Poland’s relationship with the EU is envisioned by Polish authorities. Through the discourse analysis carried out, we argue that ‘migrants’ and ‘refugees’ are discursively constructed as opposing groups in a manner that is highly visible. This discursive strategy is instrumentally used to reflect on the perceived deservingness, alterity or proximity of incoming people. We identify one unifying perspective of Poland’s relationship with the EU throughout these crises: Polish authorities are keen to stress the importance of its membership of the EU when benefiting from the latter’s restriction of migration to Europe.

Historically, approaches within the field of migrant entrepreneurship have almost exclusively focused on migration to nation-states in the Global North. Despite more-recent studies extending the scope to migrants’ home countries – and even third-country locations – they have nonetheless remained rooted in South–North migratory contexts and, subsequently, have been mainly theorised based on the concept of persistent power imbalances internationally. Indeed, studies of migrant entrepreneurship in reverse (North–South) migratory contexts have exposed a number of assumptions implicit within these approaches. What is needed, therefore, is a theoretical approach which can account for the global asymmetry hitherto overlooked in the field of migrant entrepreneurship. This paper aims to do exactly that, offering the concept of ‘global embeddedness’, which situates the phenomenon of migrant entrepreneurship within a wider, asymmetrical global environment and, in so doing, provides a way of accounting for variations in migrant entrepreneurship found outside of the Global North.

How is the well-being of returnees when considered from the point of view of the migration experience abroad? To answer this question, the first hypothesis considers that returnees differ in the function of the key activity they had abroad – working, studying or living there without working or studying. Secondly, even if one maintains constant socio-demographic profiles, the country of return counts. Thirdly, it depends also on the facet of subjective well-being (SWB) that is considered – the happiness of living in a certain country of the European Union or a person’s satisfaction with life, country, public services or income. The results of the multivariate analysis indicate that experience of migration, country of current residence and facets of SWB all count. Returnees – through their experience of migration abroad – are compared to non-migrants. The answers come from analysing data from a large Eurobarometer survey in the European Union. Multivariate regression and cluster analysis are the main data-processing procedures. The stability of the results is tested by sensitivity analysis.

Hosting large numbers of refugees in private homes rather than in refugee camps is a fairly unusual phenomenon in the broadly understood Western context, including the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Thus, explorative research is much needed to determine the fundamental problems triggered by this novel situation. Based on a series of individual in-depth interviews with Polish hosts who invited Ukrainian refugees to live in their homes, this paper puts under scrutiny the micro-relations between the hosts and the guests. The study identified 6 kinds of ‘difficulty’, including (1) negotiating everyday routines, (2) dealing with difficult life situations and stress, (3) quarrels and divisions among migrants, (4) neglecting one’s own family, (5) a too strong emotional attachment to the guests and (6) irreconcilable sets of expectations.