Discussing the Role of Aspirations in Migrant Integration: The Case Study of 1980s Polish Emigrants’ Adaptation in Western Europe

Building on aspirations and capabilities models in migration studies, this paper explores the utility of this approach for elucidating long-term integration processes. Aspirations as individual constructions of what one’s life should look like in the future are a concept used by scholars to study migrants’ motives to migrate. However, neither are aspirations an often applied analytical category, nor a sufficiently examined theoretical subject in the area of long-term migration. This paper addresses this gap and applies the category of aspirations and capabilities to the study of long-term adaptation processes of Polish emigrants of the 1980s in three European countries: Austria, Italy and Sweden. The case study illustrates the aspirations/capabilities model’s usability for studying integration processes and proves that aspirations and capabilities should be a subject of inquiry throughout migrants’ lives. As a contribution to the debate, an analytical framework along with a schema depicting live long migration processes is proposed.