Unpacking the Mobility Capacities and Imperatives of the ‘Global Generation’

Abstract

This chapter looks at the changing face of Polish young people’s mobility. We aim to demonstrate that while people born between 1984 and 1990 might, to some degree, continue the migratory modes of previous generations and older cohorts (see, e.g., Szewczyk 2015; Grabowska and Jastrzębowska 2019), they might also perceive themselves as being ‘mobile’ rather than being ‘migrants’ in the classical sense of the term (Pustulka et al. 2019). We will attempt to show that their patterns of border crossings go beyond the typical economic motivations that can be linked to structural conditions and high mobility imperatives (Cairns 2018). On the contrary, the young adults we have interviewed experience ‘mobile transitions’ (Robertson et al. 2018) and exercise their ‘mobility capacity’ (Cairns 2018) somewhat independently of negative pressures. As we will attempt to argue, the young Poles who participated in our research, all of whom had tertiary education level qualifications, appear to have quite similar characteristics to mobile young people from other, mostly Western/Northern European sending states (Cairns 2014; Cuzzocrea and Mandich 2016; King et al. 2016), situating them within what can be termed a new ‘mobile generation of choice’ (Pustulka et al. 2019).