After Brexit, a Polish entrepreneur finds her future back home

Polish workers, who flocked to the UK after Poland joined the EU in 2004, are now returning home due to Brexit, citing higher costs and a less favorable business environment.

Magdalena Poltorak fell in love with London, first as a student, then as an office worker. ​But a decade since Britain voted to leave the EU she looks around her Warsaw ​wellness studio and sees a life she believes she could never ‌have ​built in the UK.

"I couldn't really imagine myself being a startup owner or a business owner in the UK because of the high cost of entry," Poltorak, 33, told Reuters. Poltorak is part of a tide of Polish workers that surged into Britain after Poland joined the ‌EU in 2004, but have been flowing back home since Britain voted to leave the bloc 12 years later.

There were just 69,000 Polish citizns in Britain when Poland joined the EU in 2004. The number surged more than 1,300% to as many as 984,000 by 2016, according to research prepared for the British parliament the year of the Brexit vote. That was enough to make Poles the largest ‌foreign-born community in the UK, outnumbering those born in such former outposts of the British Empire as India or Pakistan, the main sources of immigration for generations. Polish overtook Welsh to become ‌the second most widely spoken language in the UK.

And Poles became a disproportionately large part of the British workforce, since most were of prime working age: nearly 70% of Polish-born people in Britain were aged 25-49, more than double the share of the UK population as a whole. But since the Brexit vote, tens of thousands of Poles have been leaving the UK each year, part of a wider return of workers over the past decade that successive Polish ⁠governments say is as ​much a result of improving economic opportunity at ⁠home as of changing conditions abroad.

By 2021, the Polish government estimated that as many as 300,000 expatriate Poles had returned over the previous three years alone. LONDON FELT LIKE HOME

Poltorak was just 20 when she first arrived in the UK ⁠with only hand luggage, planning to stay for a two-month English language course and return to Poland to study at university. But almost immediately, "London felt like home". She changed her plans and applied to a British university. ​After bouncing between jobs, she eventually found a career at the tech company Cloudflare, where she worked as a cybersecurity expert for six years, teaching yoga classes in her spare ⁠time.

While living in London she shared flats with people from Colombia, Australia, Italy and Spain, which she says shaped her early experience abroad. "I was surrounded by a lot of ambitious professionals… mostly Europeans… who wanted to achieve more than they could ⁠in their ​own countries," she said.

The 2016 referendum changed the calculus, though not overnight. Poltorak said the impact of Brexit became clearer over time, particularly in the labour market and business environment. "I remember the headlines in the newspapers that big companies are moving away from the UK. And that was quite scary. If the big companies were moving away and they were moving their headquarters... why ⁠wouldn't it be my choice as well?" she said.

After 12 years in Britain, Poltorak decided to move back to Poland. The Warsaw she returned to tells its own story: a skyline ⁠transformed with modern glass skyscrapers next to the spired ⁠concrete towers of the Communist era. In Warsaw, she realised she could afford to open her own wellness studio. She met her future husband and they plan to start a family. "It was quite a change and a lovely surprise to move back to Poland. We see headlines ‌in the newspapers that Poland is getting ‌stronger and stronger when it comes to economy," she said. "Anyone coming back can see the difference." (Reporting ​by Barbara Erling, Kuba Stezycki, Kacper Pempel)