Acquisition and Integration of Immigrants for Local Labor Markets Using New Media Tools
Streszczenie
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 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.