Nietrafne klasyfikacje? O przydatności teorii migracyjnych w badaniu polskiej emigracji lat 1980. (na przykładzie Australii)

This article aims at considering the question whether various migration theories, especially in the fields of demography and sociology, could be useful in the analysis of migration from Poland to Australia in the 1980s. The author is not able to propose definitive answers, however he suggests that the division between political and economic migration, commonly used by researchers, does not provide an effective instrument for describing this specific social group. The article shows that the majority of Poles who did have an official refugee status did not in fact fit well into the definition of a refugee. Meanwhile, among the migrants who did not obtain the refugee status, one could find many active members of the Solidarity movement and also people persecuted by the Polish authorities. Within the research on migration motives, migration transfer, adaptation processes and, to some extent, political activity of Polish migrants in Australia, the author found the following models most useful and applicable: various social network theories, Oded Stark's relative deprivation model, the model of decision-making process developed by Gerald Haberkorn or the concept of Oddyssean and Rubicon refugees by Danièle Joly. None of these theories can provide a universal tool which could allow the researcher to cover all methodological problems related to the subject of Polish migration to Australia between 1980 and 1989 – especially in the area of understanding migrants’ public activity in the new country.