Polish and East European Immigration
Banbury has one of the UK's lowest unemployment rates, dipping as low as 1% in 2005, although it has since risen due to the recession which began in 2008. with a resultant high demand for labour. Once Poland joined the European Union in 2004, a number of Banbury-based employment agencies began advertising for staff in major Polish newspapers. According to an estimate by the Banbury Polish Association, there are between 5,000 and 6,000 Poles in the town. The influx of the largely Roman Catholic Polish workers has revitalised Banbury's Catholic churches, to the extent that at least one now offers a Mass said partially in Polish. Additionally specialist Polish food shops have opened as well as supermarkets such as Tesco opening specialist food counters for the Polish migrants.
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“Use the stones of another hill to polish your own jade.”
—Chinese proverb.
“The East is marvellously interesting for tracing our steps back. But for going forward, it is nothing. All it can hope for is to be fertilised by Europe, so that it can start on a new phase.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“European society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been. A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition—of intellectual activity, of letters—and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this tradition does not exist in America.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)