| Lukasz Gruzla, a university graduate from southwestern Poland, loads planes at Luton Airport outside London. He has no plans to return to his hometown near Wroclaw.
"Come back to what?" Gruzla, 25, asked as he waited for a flight to London after visiting his family in Poland. "The work I have there allows me to live. I can buy a car, pay my bills."
But Gruzla, one of at least 400,000 Poles who have emigrated to Britain since 2004, is just the type of worker that Wroclaw is trying to lure back. While Poland has the highest unemployment rate in the European Union, this statistic masks a growing shortage of skilled workers.
Higher pay and the availability of low-cost airline flights are siphoning off the country's best-educated young people to Western Europe.
Wroclaw, in Lower Silesia, is the fourth-largest city in Poland. It is a hub for technology research that has attracted companies like Hewlett-Packard and Google, and it benefits from road and rail links built when the area was ruled by Germany and Austria. The city, which nearly as close to Berlin as it is to Warsaw, is nonetheless struggling to fill 125,000 jobs created over the past two years...
Read more in the International Herald Tribune | 
