Demographic changes are among the most important long-term challenges facing Poland. In
2019, the theoretical fertility rate TFR reached in Poland with a value of 1.42 children per
woman which puts Poland in 190th place in the world out of 208 classified countries and territories.
This trend will, in the long term, together with the factor of demographic aging of the
population, its progressive disappearance. This state of affairs will have a number of negative,
long-term consequences affecting the condition of the Polish economy, causing the risk of secular
stagnation. It will adversely affect the value and structure of income and expenditures from
the central budget, the size of the budgets of Local Government Units and caused problems in
local labor markets. This situation will jeopardize the quality of the provision of public services
in territorial areas. It will have a radical impact on the level of pension security for the elderly.
The systematic decline in the population of working age, may lead to a situation in which
it will decrease from its current size to only about 10.8 million in the year 2100, i.e. by 52.3%.
According to expert projections, the indicated forecast effect of this trend will be a contributing
factor to secular stagnation or long-term recession economy. The state and especially local
governments face a number of serious challenges, on a scale not known before. These processes
will be compounded, no doubt, by the negative effects of a warming climate and ongoing environmental
degradation, the climate crisis energy, climate migration not to mention the threat
of military conflict, which not so long ago was difficult to imagine, as was a global pandemic.
Preparing communities for such profound changes, should now not only be the subject of scientific
deliberations and theories built by the environment, but is already a declaration of the
present time, for the sake of future generations of Poles.
The growing deficits in the labor force, being the result of a number of factors, are becoming
increasingly acute in the global labor market. The problem is spreading to national, regional,
and especially local labor markets. The dynamics of business development, changes caused by
technological progress, and demographic processes resulting in aging societies with declining
fertility rates are among the determinants of the phenomenon causing changes. The labor market
is increasingly becoming a market with the growing importance of workers. The scramble
for workers is intensifying the recruitment efforts of business entities with increasing support
from the state and local governments of individual countries. Labor shortages are increasingly
being eliminated by targeting foreign workers, intensifying the phenomenon of labor migration.
This entails the implementation of integration programs with varying degree of effectiveness.
Problems resulting from integration processes involve not only the immigrants themselves but
also the societies to which they emigrate. The resulting relationships in the place of their new
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residence are often very complicated, especially when the immigrants are characterized by great
cultural differences from the societies in which they arrive. The question arises to what extents
the changes taking place require the consideration of local labor markets in the development
strategies of Local Government Units. Is it possible to eliminate labor deficits with the help
of foreign workers of convergent cultural characteristics with the local community, and what
methods and tools are necessary for this process?
Comprehensive immigration management is the series of implemented and postulated
management activities at multiple levels: supranational, national, regional and local, with the
interpenetration of spheres - public and private, domestic and international. This component is
intended to define the dynamics of governance and remove the barriers of the decision-making
system, understood physically as the boundaries of territorial units and functionally as political
constraints. This governance is a complex process, as spatial and process relations form a complex
network of relationships. The intention of the authors of the presented book is to try to
look at the ability of local governments to build in their labor markets a strategy that takes
into account foreign workers and is consistent with the national strategy, if there is such. The
local labor market in the proposed approach will be understood as a territorial product, which
fits theoretically into the concept of territorial marketing. The present study is the result of
cooperation between the authors from the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, and the
University of St. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, Slovakia. Against the background of selected
theoretical and practical issues, including the citation of the results of research on the presence
of the subject of immigration in the Slovak media, a model for building a marketing strategy for
the acquisition and integration of immigrants for the needs of local markets has been proposed.
The model developed by Wiktor Widera contains a unique concept of pre-integration, initiated
before the arrival of the immigrant to a place outside the borders of his homeland, which is, by his
own choice, the place of professional activity and consequently, periodic or long-term life activity.