Not Enough Pierogi Eaters in Chicago

Polish Outlook pointed me in the direction of this Bloomberg article. It tries to show that fewer Poles are heading to the U.S., especially Chicago, to get illegal jobs because they can find legal ones in western Europe. Not a far stretch to see the rational for this, although the mostly anecdotal evidence in the article doesn't prove very convincing.

One indication: fewer people eat pierogi at the Czerwone Jabluszko restaurant. Having eaten there once with the fam, I must say a more likely reason is that they're not very good...

Ultimately, it's not too easy to count illegal immigrants because most often they, surprisingly, don't want to be counted. I'll withhold my judgment on this one, even though I wouldn't be surprised if there were fewer Poles in Chicago, or Green Point in New York, or other spots around the U.S.

Chicago Winter Is Baaack

Here's what I'm missing in Chicago: the snow, the cold, the nasty. OK, maybe I'm not missing it thaaat much.

Chicago Tribune on Polish Slave Labor in Italy

My friend Chris Spolar of The Chicago Tribune wrote a nice piece on the Polish workers who basically worked as slaves in Italy. This story, of course, broke quite a while ago and was, not surprisingly, huge news in Poland. But it's good to see that it has filtered down to the States, at least to the home paper of the largest conglomeration of Poles outside Poland. (Chris used to be a correpondent based in Warsaw)

This is just another indication that the "Polish migrant" stories will be in the headlines for years, even on this side of the ocean.