Hybrid Format

Temporary Labor Mobility and War Refugee Inflow from Ukraine to Poland: Challenges and Opportunities of Using Different Data Sources to Study Migrant Fertility

Weronika Kloc-Nowak
Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography, November 23, 2022

Weronika Kloc-Nowak talked about Ukrainian war refugees registry available as a very detailed and open dataset in Poland.

Abstract

Migration from Ukraine to Poland, largely temporary and circular, has been observed for over two decades and expanding since 2014. From February 24, 2022 the full-scale Russian invasion on Ukraine generated a massive movement of war refugees, resulting in more than doubling of the number of Ukrainian nationals in Poland. How to study the consequences of such a vast and dynamic inflow in the scarcity of register data in the host country?

In Poland, different administrative datasets are not linked into a coherent register data system accessible to the researchers. When estimating the size and structure of the immigrant population we have to rely on fragmented data several registries. In contrast, the registration of the war refugees resulted in the creation of the registry available as a very detailed and open dataset. We will discuss how this dataset can be used to analyse monthly births among the female war refugees and compare their fertility rates with the ones in Ukraine. Importantly, in the case of earlier pre-war cohorts of Ukrainian female immigrants in Poland, calculating fertility rates was not possible due to the lack of denominator.

The two researchers will also discuss ideas for conducting a survey on fertility behaviour and intentions among Ukrainian females in Poland as a wave of a panel study. It was initiated at Warsaw University in July 2022 with an online survey of 7.6 thousands Ukrainians in Poland, among whom over 4 thousands gave a consent to participate in subsequent studies. We will analyse the survey’s coverage vis a vis the above mentioned registers and compare the pre-war mainly labour migrants and a subsequent war refugee movement from Ukraine acknowledging that these two groups are highly connected through migratory networks.

About

Weronika Kloc-Nowak received a PhD in Social and Political Science from the European University Institute in Florence for her research on the post-accession settlement of migrants from Poland and their family lives in Italy and Great Britain. In her research Weronika specialises in the dynamics of migrant families, transnational care and intergenerational relations. Her most recent research project concentrates on the impact of out-migration, return migration and immigration on the parenting norms, reproductive intentions and fertility patterns in Poland.

Co-author: Agata Górny, Uniwersytet Warszawski