Why would they want to bear the burden of an "hostile environment" (as the UK Home Office named their policy towards foreigners) AND declining economic prospects due to an economic suicide they had no say in?

Poland has been booming for a long time even before Brexit. I think it was a latent force just waiting to be set free by Perestroika and free market forces.

I'd travelled to Warsaw a few times maybe 20 or so years ago, and you could feel the vibrancy and energy in the air.

Before and after Covid. It made a lot of people (in general - not thinking about Poles in particular) think about where they wanted to live. it was a pretty bad time to be away from home, family, etc.

> before Brexit - a decent number of polish people in the UK doing all types of work.

The comedian Omid Djalili (a Brit of Iranian descent) had a number of "Polish plumber" skits:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vppmzUZENfc

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8mjzu0Runo

To be fair the gap has been tightening for quite a while and it’s likely that adjusted by living expenses it’s not that hard for those engineers to find higher paying jobs in Poland compared to the UK.

Before 2004 there used to be a decent number of antipodeans working in finance in London.

After 2004, the numbers dropped noticeably.

This feels apt: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

I’m not polish (but still european) and i wouldn’t go to the uk anymore.

The UK used to be “the dream” when i was a teenager, now it’s the empty shell of what it used to be.

This is because big corporations supporting Brexit figured out it will be better for their bottom line if they could source labour from wider pool and have it tied to visa. Something EU workers would never be comfortable with. Hence you had the so called Boriswave - an influx of workers paid below market rates supporting big corporations able to navigate Home Office corrupt system. Conservative party never told the public what it was really about - bringing in very much slave workforce to exploit - at the expense of working class and SMEs.

By the looks of it, Conservative party will never recover from this betrayal and soon followed by Labour who decided to maintain the status quo.

I mean, it makes things more difficult, right?

I think the bigger factor is that Polish immigration has effectively ended. We're seeing more Poles returning from abroad than leaving. With the prosperity and stability of Poland, coupled by living in your home culture, immigration is simply not that attractive.

(Traditionally, much of Polish immigration was meant to be temporary. A good number of Poles stayed abroad and assimilated, because immigration tends to be "sticky".)

Tbf, SWE salaries are constant across much of Europe, so anyone who is working in CEE feels less of a pull to work in London as a line-level engineer for roughly the same salary as they'd get in Warsaw. Funnily enough, even Bangalore salaries [0] are catching up to Italy [1] and Romania [2].

As a founder, it's a different story though - London is hard to beat from an entrepreneurship and capital access standpoint aside from parts of the CEE with strong ties to to American VC due to diaspora ties.

Edit: can't reply

> dzonga

Completely agree. I've O-1'ed plenty of European and British founders. But London is better than the rest of Europe from a raising perspective, which shows how bad the situation is in the rest of the continent.

[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...

[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy

[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/romania

God I miss Eastern European tradespeople.

British tradespeople in my experience are duplicitous, lazy, unmotivated, low quality, cocky and expensive.