Poland has been shifting in recent years from an emigration to an immigration country. Despite a dynamic inflow of migrants from Ukraine and other parts of the world the country lacks a clear migration policy. The last framework policy document in this category, produced before the current government led by the Law and Justice party came to power, was suspended in 2016. Since then, the government has been developing a new one. Leaked drafts have caused an outcry among migration specialists and resulted in the sacking of two key persons responsible for the management of migration flows in the country. Many experts fear that the unprecedented politicisation of migration which helped the parties forming the current government to achieve very good results in the 2015 parliamentary elections may repeat itself in the upcoming elections scheduled for October 13, 2019.
Poland as a country of immigration
According to the Eurostat, in 2016 Poland recorded the highest number of employment-related residence permits (almost half a million) for third country nationals among the EU Member States. Apart from Ukraine they came also from such countries as Belorussia, Russia, Vietnam, India and China – to name the most numerous groups registered by the Office for Foreigners. Other estimations based on analysis of mobile phone usage data pointed out that there were 1.25 million Ukrainians residing in Poland at the beginning of 2019. Thus, Poland, whose citizens in the last three decades have significantly contributed to the European migration processes and form a new diaspora of over 2 million persons, has been clearly transforming from a net-emigration towards a net-immigration country.
However, the Polish government has been very unwilling to admit these facts for fear that this could discourage voters from casting ballots for parties forming the ruling coalition. One of the high officials of the Ministry of Investment and Economic Development, Paweł Chorąży, who has been actively seeking to adjust Polish migration policy to these new conditions, lost his job for talking openly about the need for more efficient tools of integration policy rather than new efforts to repatriate people. In spite of the political promises reluctantly made in 2015, at the climax of the migration crisis, to receive a few thousand refugees in the name of European solidarity under the mechanism of relocation and resettlement, the governments of Beata Szydło and Mateusz Morawiecki have refused to fulfil these state commitments. Even if Poland was not directly affected by the migration and refugee crisis, forced migration has started to play a crucial role in the country’s key political narratives since the parliamentary elections of 2015.
