The Role of Diverse Family Arrangements in Shaping Integration Outcomes of Ukrainian Migrants in Poland

Agata Gorny
Weronika Kloc-Nowak, University of Warsaw

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine induced massive Ukrainian migration to Europe and particularly to Poland in 2022. The media image of an average Ukrainian post-war migrant is a woman migrating alone with children in search of a safe place to stay. However, over three years since the outburst of the war, the structure of Ukrainian population has become much more complex. The goal of the paper is to identify types of Ukrainian migrants’ in Poland households structures/family arrangements (with the focus on country of residence of their members) and relationships between these types and selected integration outcomes, as well as migration-related (return migration) and family-related (fertility) intentions. With respect to integration outcomes, we focus on an objective indicator of economic integration (labour market status) and on a subjective measure of migrants’ life satisfaction, following other recent studies stressing its importance in research on migrants’ integration. Data analysed in the paper derive from a country-wide online survey of Ukrainian migrants in Poland – both pre-war and post-war migrants - conducted in April-July 2024 (N=2118) on a unique research panel of Ukrainian migrants. We construct a typology of family arrangements using cluster analysis and estimate regression models for each outcome variable. Preliminary results suggest that family arrangements constitute a significant predictor of the studied integration and intentions indicators, and that taking a transnational perspective is needed for better understanding these mechanisms. Our research contributes to the understudied topic of interrelations between family factors and migrants’ integration, particularly among forced migrants.

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 Presented in Session P4. Migration, Migrants, and Mobility