Wroclaw Letter: The farewell party presses against the perimeter fence, and a thicket of hands waves at the aircraft as it moves off onto the runway, writes Daniel McLaughlin
They wave again as the blue, white and gold jet lifts westward towards Dublin or Shannon, London or Glasgow, carrying another cargo of young Poles away to Ireland and Britain, to the work and wages that they cannot find in their homeland.
The scene is repeated several times a day at airports across Poland, and in the Baltic states to the north, in countries that have lost hundreds of thousands of young people to Ireland and Britain since joining the European Union in May 2004.
In two years, about 116,000 Poles are thought to have swapped a country with 18 per cent unemployment - the highest in the EU - for Ireland, which has the bloc's lowest jobless rate of just 4.5 per cent, while some 500,000 more have sought work in Britain.
Poles in Dublin and London now have little problem tuning into media in their native language or finding their favourite food from back home, while many make four or five times what they would in Poland were they fortunate enough to find work there.
Economists say Ireland, Britain and Sweden - the only EU members that threw open their labour markets to people from eight new member states in 2004 - gained from an injection of young, skilled and highly-motivated labour into ageing workforces.
But while their growing economies suck in cheap and productive migrant workers from eastern Europe, countries like Poland are increasingly alarmed at the "brain drain".
Now Wroclaw, a city of 630,000 people close to the German and Czech borders, has launched a bid to bring Poles back home.
"We are launching a poster campaign in clubs, pubs and other places popular with Polish people, telling them that Wroclaw wants them back," said city official Pawel Romaszkan of a project aimed at Poles living in Ireland and Britain.
"Companies here are already having problems finding the right employees, and in the next few years Wroclaw will create at least 100,000 more jobs for skilled people in computer technology, bio-technology, engineering and so on," he added.
"The people who left are brave and free-thinking, and didn't fall into despair about unemployment but did something about it. They got up and left, but we need them here now to maintain our dynamic development."
That dynamism is apparent in bustling Wroclaw, where a pristine old town, acres of parkland and the shimmering canals of the Odra river cannot mask a construction boom fuelled by millions of euro of investment from dozens of major foreign firms.
Allied Irish Banks, whose Polish subsidiary is based here, has just ceded its crown as Wroclaw's biggest foreign investor to LG-Philips, the Korean electronics giant which is building a huge new plant on the edge of town. For the design and construction firms tasked with turning corporate plans into reality, staunching Poland's haemorrhage of talent is already a priority.
"We have advertised in the UK and Ireland to encourage people to return to Poland," said Joanna Bensz, a manager at the Wroclaw office of Dublin-based Project Management Group.
"Big firms want projects done quickly and there's great competition for good staff," she said. "We have problems finding enough experienced quantity surveyors, engineers and project managers.
And while a construction worker might make €250 a month here, he can easily make €1,000 in Britain or Ireland." While in Wroclaw salaries are growing and unemployment is a relatively low 10 per cent, the city's hinterland is still suffering a heavy post-communist hangover.
Around the town of Walbrzych, about 60km (40mls) from Wroclaw, almost one-in-three people are still jobless after the local coalmines were closed in the 1990s, decimating the Silesia region's industry and putting hundreds of thousands of people out of work.
Kazimierz Szaruga (52) was a Walbrzych miner, but knows that his children may find their future far from here.
"I went abroad myself to work in the 1990s, so I know that sometimes it has to be done," he said as his daughter Violeta (26) boarded a flight at Wroclaw airport.
"She is going to London and has a place to stay and a job in a factory lined up," he said. "It's sad she has to leave - but hopefully things are easier there than here."
In a Wroclaw job centre, careers counsellor Dominika Buczkowska said the first thought of many young Polish graduates is to work abroad.
"A decade ago, most Poles wanted any job as long as it was five minutes from home," she said.
"Now, they know they have to travel to find work and, when they go abroad, the whole world opens up to them. It's hard to leave Poland, but it's hard to come back here, too."