Eastern Europe Reporter
Inside an immigration office in central Warsaw, dozens of people, mostly speaking Russian and Ukrainian, sit and wait for their numbers to appear on screens.
Filipino, Congolese and Vietnamese nationals, to name a few, are also waiting in line.
May, a 49-year-old from the Philippines, came to Poland last year with eight other Filipinos, to work on a factory line for a cosmetics company.
“I have just collected my three-year visa,” she told RTÉ News, adding that the immigration staff were “very accommodating”.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees have settled in Poland, and they have the same access rights to Poland’s labour market as EU citizens.
Ukrainian, Belarusian and Georgian nationals account for most of the immigration from non-EU countries to Poland, but migrants from elsewhere are arriving too.
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In 2022, more than 10,000 work visas were issued to Turkish nationals, and almost the same number to Indian nationals.
About 5,000 visas went to citizens of the Philippines, and smaller numbers to citizens of Bangladesh, and former Soviet republics, like Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.
These figures make up a small fraction of the workforce in a country of almost 40 million inhabitants, but they have increased year-on-year since the ruling right-wing Law and Justice party came to power in 2015.
Law and Justice, however, is less keen on “illegal immigrants”, many of whom try to enter Poland via its border with Belarus.
This week, the party passed a bill in parliament which will enable four referendum questions to be posed on the same day as the country’s parliamentary election in mid-October.
Two of the referendum questions deal with immigration. (The other two questions deal with the sale of state-owned companies and the age of retirement).
Voters will be asked if they “support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, in accordance with the forced relocation mechanism imposed by European bureaucracy?”
It is a reference to the EU’s new migration pact, approved by most member states in June, but which Poland and Hungary opposed.
Under the deal, member states would accept a set number of relocated migrants from other EU countries, or instead, choose to make a “solidarity payment”.
However, Ylva Johansson, EU Commissioner for Home Affairs and Migration, told online news service onet.pl in June that Poland, along with the Czech Republic, will be exempt from making solidarity payments, given that the countries had already accepted such large numbers of Ukrainian refugees.
This assurance from Brussels has not stopped Law and Justice from pushing ahead with their referendum questions on immigration on election day.
‘Marketing technique’
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced the wording of the referendum question in a video on his Twitter profile earlier this week.
The video features footage of burning cars, and a black man looking at the camera and licking a large knife, while Mr Morawiecki says, “We all know what is happening on the streets of western Europe. Rapes, murders, arson, vandalised streets, horror suburbs”.
The referendum on immigration is a “marketing technique” by Law and Justice aimed at “mobilising its core voters”, said Wojciech Przybylski, a political analyst.
“They’re worried that they will not have enough numbers on the election day.”
Support for Law and Justice is highest among voters who live outside of big cities, particularly in the east of the country.
The party is under pressure from the business sector to issue more work permits to foreign nationals, said Mr Przybylski, editor-in-chief of Visegrad Insight, while, at the same time, “its core voters, who do not live in areas where most migrants work, feel threatened by new arrivals”.
Another referendum question will ask Poles if they “support” the removal of the country’s border barrier with Belarus.
However, Poland’s opposition parties are not proposing that the 5.5-metre steel barrier, which runs along the border with Belarus, should be dismantled.
Questions are ‘invalid’ – Tusk
Donald Tusk, leader of the main centrist opposition Civic Platform party, said this week that the questions are “invalid”, and that the government was using the issue of migrants “cynically” for its “own political gain”.
Civic Platform also claims that the referendums are a way for the Law and Justice government to use public funds in order to promote its own electoral agenda.
A government spokesperson told reporters this week that the referendum questions are crucial for the security of Poles and Poland.
Poland has an ageing population with one of the lowest birth rates in Europe.
More than two million Poles, mostly young workers, emigrated to western Europe in the years following the country’s accession to the EU in 2004.
Many, like in Ireland, have put down permanent roots, raising their children abroad.
And while Ukrainian nationals now account for more than 3% of Poland’s population, they are unlikely to fill all of the gaps required by Polish employers.
According to a report published last month by ZUS, Poland’s state social security agency, the country would need to attract 200,000 extra workers each year until 2032 in order to replace the number of people reaching retirement age.
Increase in border crossings
So far this year, 19,000 refugees, mainly from Middle Eastern countries have attempted to cross into Poland from Belarus, according to the Polish Border Guard – an increase on 16,000 “illegal crossings” throughout all of last year.
Many of those refugees do not stay in Poland, often heading to Germany instead.
Just over 11,000 applications were made for asylum last year in Poland, but more than half of those applications were made by Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian nationals.
The numbers of Iraqi, Syrian and Afghan refugees seeking asylum in Poland, each year number in the hundreds.
“The referendum questions are absurd,” Dominika Pszczolkowska-Moscicka, a researcher at the University of Warsaw’s Centre for Migration Research, told RTÉ News.
She said that Law and Justice had a “very liberal immigration policy”, but was “scaremongering against the same people that they are letting in as labour migrants, sometimes even from the same countries”.
Eastern Europe Reporter
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