POLISH COMMUNITIES ABROAD


Fourteen to seventeen million Poles are estimated to live abroad, mainly in the USA (6-10 million), Germany (about 1.5 million), Brasil (about 1 million), France (about 1 million), Canada (about 600,000), Belarus (400,000-1 million), Ukraine (300,000-500,000), Lithuania (250,00-300,000), the United Kingdom (about 150,000), Australia (130,000-180,000), Argentina (100,000-170,000), Russia (about 100,000), the Czech Republic (70,000-100,000) and Kazakhstan (60,000-100,000).
This immense number of Polish expatriates and foreigners who declare themselves to be of Polish descent (17 million, the equivalent of about 40% of Poland's current population) is a result of complex historical processes which started in the late 18th century when Poland disappeared from the map of Europe, partitioned by its three powerful neighbours, Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Poles, who never accepted the loss of their statehood, staged numerous but unsuccessful uprisings. The last great wave of emigration hit Poland after the Second World War, when the country came to be governed by Moscow-backed Communists. Despite limited contact with the free world, deliberately hindered by the authorities through measures like restrictions on the issue of passports, between 1956 and 1980 about 800,000 people emigrated from Poland to the USA and West European countries, some for political reasons, as opponents of the Communist regime; others simply in search of a better life. In the 1980s alone, some 270,000 Poles left the country.