Abstract

This paper looks at war-induced migration flows from Ukraine to Poland and Germany in 2022 to understand who is migrating and the challenges they face. Data were collected in the spring and summer of 2022 through survey questionnaires and interviews. The results of the research reveal that a) this wave of migration from Ukraine is overwhelmingly female; b) women are often migrating with children, which makes arranging appropriate childcare and school placement essential to their entry into the destination workforce; c) Ukrainian labor migration patterns before the war have had a significant impact on current flows; d) Ukrainian refugees to Poland and Germany often want to be able to travel regularly back to Ukraine; this affects their willingness to apply for temporary protection schemes that oblige them to remain in destination countries, which in turn makes it difficult to precisely quantify the number of refugees in a given country.