Why Migrants Settle in Small Towns: Polish ‘New Immigrant Destinations’
2026-07-20
The article contributes to literature on place attachment, migration transition and migrants' motives for settling in new immigrant destinations (NIDs). It focuses on small towns of under 20,000 population. Such towns are often claimed to be unattractive to migrants. Nonetheless, some migrants do choose smaller towns, even in Central and Eastern Europe, where many countries have only just acquired net immigration. Based on 38 interviews with migrants from different countries in two Polish towns, the article presents migrants' perceptions about the benefits of smallness, particularly the quality of social relations, and the suitability of small locations for people like them. Despite being labour migrants and refugees, many self‐identified as people who chose a small‐town lifestyle, also invoking identity factors such as age and parental status to back up their claims that the towns were just right for people like themselves. Interviewees compared their home locations in the sending and receiving countries, engaging in ‘elastic geography’ to assert and sometimes exaggerate similarities in population size. Place attachment is a process, and the study showed how some participants—particularly middle‐aged parents—increasingly identified with the small town in Poland and actively ‘made it their own’.