In 2017, I moved out of Poland, first to Ireland and then to the ocean. In particular, this second decision made me in the country little and less; all the more so that for almost the full 2020 and 2021 trips were greatly hampered by the pandemic. And erstwhile I'm in the country, I usually turn around in my family.
Therefore, it was specified a shock for me to visit Warsaw in October.
Warsaw has a peculiar place in my heart — in Poland we do not truly appreciate how large and dynamic the metropolis is; even if it does not look like historical (and frequently boring) cities like Vienna or Budapest. Just before leaving the country, I lived in Warsaw. Already then a large part (if not most) of Uber drivers or cashier in the store was from Ukraine. I believed that with the economical improvement of Poland Warsaw could become a real metropolis for all east Europe – the office of global (perfectly Polish) corporations, a lighthouse of culture; a city to which young Ukrainians, Romanians and Lithuanians want to go to and stay there.
The reality seems to exceed my expectations, and sooner than I always expected.
Walking through the streets of Warsaw sometimes it is hard to know that we are in Poland. The multicolored crowd speaks Polish, English, Ukrainian, Hindi, Korean, Russian, Arabic and a full scope of languages and dialects that I cannot identify. The Israeli cafeteria is adjacent to the Caucasian bakery, and across the street you can hear Vietnamese making banh mi. In the mediate Uzbek in Kufi eats hummus alongside a group of Africans, and serves a waitress speaking mostly Hebrew. In another place, Indian beautiful Polish helps a little knowledgeable Polish colleague accept orders for beef burgers. Ticket machines offer a menu in 4 or 5 languages. At the Central Station there are at least as many commercials in Cyrillic as in the Latin alphabet. Indiscriminately, the capital became an global city, and what is more, almost without any (so far) cultural or spiritual dissension.
But it's not just Warsaw. The same is actual in Wrocław, Krakow, Białystok, Gliwice and even in Tarnobrzeg or Nowa Sola. Poland from the country of migrants became, quietly, a country of immigrants. More and more media are noticing this phenomenon, slow admitting to the approval of conservative authorities, but amazingly hard to answer the question: how many of these foreigners truly are?
It's hard to find out in the Central Statistical Office
One thing is certain: in determining the number of foreigners in Poland, 1 cannot number on the Central Statistical Office. The results of the census determined this number as... 111.8 1000 people. For comparison at the same time, by ZUS, social safety contributions were set aside 765 000 foreigners, nearly 7 times more, and not counting children, students, household members and so on.
Such a low number of immigrants in Poland according to the Central Statistical Office is caused by a circumstantial method of calculating the number of residents by this institution. The CSO operates with 2 definitions: national and international. The national definition of the population includes all Polish citizens with reports in Poland (regardless of where they live) and foreigners who live in our country temporarily (as the CSO determines who lives temporarily and who does not). How useless is this definition? Let examples testify:
Young Johnny, whose parent is Polish, and his father is British and who has lived in Sheffield since childhood, but after his parent has Polish citizenship and study to his grandmother's flat in Poland counts to the population according to national definition,
but 20-year-old Yulia, who has lived and studied in Poland since 2019 and is going to stay here after college, does not number to the number of Polish residents according to this definition, due to the fact that she is on various temporary visas.
The fact that the CSO under the slogan “population number” gives the population according to this definition is an unfunny joke. In turn, the number of people according to the global definition, i.e. as any reasonable individual would say as a definition of the population, the CSO states as “a resident population”.
To complicate the situation, last week the Central Statistical Office provided further data on foreigners in Poland, in which the number of foreigners is already more real and amounts to 1459,2 1000 people. Of this, 1132.2 000 are citizens of countries in Europe outside the EU, mainly Ukraine.
However, this data is not the actual number of foreigners surviving in Poland. In this data in explanation (although I do not anticipate it to be so) there may be people who work in Poland on the basis of a message of entrustment of work to a foreigner, which in 2021 was actually issued only for 6 months, after which the foreigner had to live outside Poland for 6 months. It was a typical temporary work visa, and here, in fact, people on specified a visa should not be included in the population of a given country, due to the fact that they do not live in that country constantly.
So if it's not CSO, then what?
We have already established that CSO data should be treated with any reserve. So let us look at another sources and how much they let us to estimation the number of foreigners in Poland.
Office for Foreigners
UdSC collects data on foreigners who presently arrive in Poland on the basis of valid residence permits (the alleged residence cards) — so it does not include foreigners who are in Poland for example visas. This office runs a boreal ♪ I don't know ♪which has late been subjected to a lift to hinder its use. According to this portal, 222.8 1000 people had a affirmative decision on request to stay in Poland in 2021. The page does not specify clearly whether it was the number of all active applications (which sounds likely) or only those that were settled in 2021 (sounds high). However, only 23.2,000 of these applications afraid permanent residence, EU resident residence or global protection — the remaining were temporary residence. And that's where we go into the black hole, due to the fact that we don't know if we're talking about 3 months, six months, 12 months, possibly 3 years? Unfortunately, the site does not specify it.
Public employment Services
The Ministry of household and Social Policy, in turn, publishes data on the employment of foreigners in Poland, collected by region labour offices, in dedicated valoral. There are 3 main types of schemes, on the basis of which foreigners get to work in Poland.
Work permit may get a foreigner from outside the EU and the European economical Area who is not a exile at the same time and has no residence licence in Poland (more details Here.). The employer must apply to the Labour Office for specified authorisation. UP carries out a labour marketplace test and then makes a decision. specified authorisation shall be issued for a limited period of up to 3 years. In 2021, 504.2 1000 foreigners were granted work permits, including 325.2 1000 from Ukraine. another countries with a comparatively large number of permits are listed below:
Statement of entrustment of work to a foreigner This is simply a simplified procedure for hiring citizens of Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova or Ukraine (by October there were besides citizens of Russia). The employer declares the intention to employment a foreigner to the Labour Office who does not carry out the labour marketplace test. The downside of this solution is that specified a foreigner may be employed for a maximum of 24 months in Poland, after which he must leave or change the visa kind (until the beginning of this year the rules were even stricter — 6 months of work and then a minimum of 6 months outside Poland).
In 2021, as many as 1.3 million specified statements were reported (of which more than a million for Ukrainians), but it is worth noting that many abuses happen here. ultimate Chamber of Control showed, that as many as 72% of foreigners who received a Schengen visa on the basis of these statements never took up work in Poland (only for example passed through our country on the way to illegal work in Germany). In view of this, it is hard to find how many people stay in Poland.
Finally, we inactive have permits for seasonal work of a foreigner, however, we will not consider here, due to the fact that by definition specified foreigners live in Poland only briefly.
Social Insurance Institution
Another interesting origin of data about employed foreigners is ZUS. By latest data from the end of October, the number of foreigners insured in the Polish strategy increased to 1,080 million, of which 765,8 1000 were Ukrainians, and 104,1 1000 were Belarusians. Unfortunately, we do not have a division here between those who work in Poland temporarily and those who have de facto settled in Poland. However, the ever-increasing number of foreigners in the Social safety Office suggests that a crucial percent of them have been surviving in Poland for any time now.
Ministry of Education and discipline
However, foreigners are not just labour. With a longer stay in our country, many of them began to bring their families to Poland, including children.
This can be seen perfectly in data on the number of students with Polish citizenship in Polish schools. While the number of foreigners students was comparatively constant in 2017-19, it has been firing up since 2020. Data for 2022 are not yet known, but the exile students themselves from Ukraine at the end of September were nearly 200 000.1
Another group of foreigners in our country are students. At the end of 2021 there were 85 897, mainly from Ukraine (36 thousand) and Belarus (11.1 thousand), but besides from more exotic directions like India (2.5 thousand), Zimbabwe (2.4 thousand) or Nigeria (2,000).
By the way, Poland should let specified students to extend their stay in Poland in a structured way. In the USA, where Silicon Valley fundamentally consists of highly educated foreigners, there is simply a peculiar program (with additional facilities for graduates of the kind STEM) allowing graduates of American universities to stay in the US.
What about the refugees?
Of course, we can compose a lot about the state of 2021 erstwhile in 2022 the planet completely changed with Russian aggression to Ukraine. About 7 million Ukrainians left their country, settling mainly in Poland and Germany. During the highest period, 1.4 million Ukrainian refugees lived in Poland.
However, I do not number the number of refugees to the full number of immigrants in Poland. Why? First, I want to avoid double counting. Refugees who have taken up work in Poland appear in ZUS data and their children most likely in MEiN data. Secondly, the longer the war continues, the more it seems that, contrary to expectations, most refugees will return to Ukraine or proceed westward. Already today, the number of refugees in Poland has fallen below a million and is 942,000.
The following years will show how many Ukrainian refugees decided to stay in Poland. Ukrainians greatly rejuvenated our society — the median age in Poland fell by about six months due to the influx of Ukrainian children and young women. It would be a large failure for Poland if these people decided to go to Germany or another countries, supporting their economies alternatively of ours.
Capitalism Answers
Finally, interesting, though possibly more to track trends than the actual population, the origin of data is... Facebook. By moving the site, I can advance circumstantial posts or the full page and mark people in different geographical areas, and besides mark them with demographic features specified as language or origin.
As of October 8, 2022, 19,4-22.8 million profiles of people over the age of 18 can be reached in Poland. However, only 18,1-21.2 million of them have owners speaking Polish.2 Among the others, the largest group are those speaking the languages of the erstwhile USSR: Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, Georgian, Azerbaijani, Armenian, Kazakh, Uzbek and Tajik. This is according to Facebook 1.1-1.3 million people3. Another 36,2-42,6 1000 people talk the languages of Southeast Asia, including Hindi, Nepalese, Vietnamese, Punjabi or Urdu. For a small over 10,000 people Facebook evaluates the population speaking Far East languages: Korean, nipponese and Chinese. A small more, due to the fact that 13.4-15,8,000 talk Arabic or Persian.
However, in the case of these estimates, it should be remembered that they besides include Polish citizens actively utilizing given languages on Facebook (e.g. those who compose posts or like content in these languages). This can be seen well erstwhile we look at Western European languages, especially English, which is spoken on Polish Facebook by almost 1 in 5 users. I don't think I gotta convince that there are 4 million immigrants from English-speaking countries in Poland. However, it can be considered that in the case of the abovementioned east languages, the number of Poles actively speaking them is very limited (even in the case of Russian).
Summary
It is sad that our public statistic are not able to supply clear data on how many foreigners live in Poland and, instead, they twist with different definitions. However, utilizing another sources, it seems reasonable to estimation the number of foreigners settled in Poland for about 1-2 million people. This figure consists of:
About 200 000 people with an active long-term, temporary or EU resident stay (those do not gotta apply for a work permit)
approximately 600-700 000 people who at any time have at least an yearly work permit. This shall be made up of:
Work licence for 24-36 months — approx. 220,000 people (we can presume that most of them get approval for the maximum period available, i.e. in the 3rd year it would be over 600 1000 people along with “new fish”)
work licence for 12-24 months — approx. 100 000 people
About 250 000 children and youth (182,000 Ukrainian refugees in schools + non-Ukrainian children + children who are besides tiny to go to school)
I do not number students due to the fact that a large number of them most likely work simultaneously (most abroad students attend private universities), and those who do not work are most likely temporarily in Poland (Erasmus, medical students, etc.)
I besides do not number refugees, for the reasons described in the chapter dedicated to them
I invitation you to discuss what another data can be utilized to estimation the number of refugees in Poland!
In total, there are even more Ukrainian children in Poland, but many of them are either besides tiny to go to school or kindergarten, or they learn utilizing (their way much better than Polish) a platform for distant learning from Ukraine, predicting a return to their homeland after the war.
Interestingly, interesting changes happen in 1 month. According to the state on 2 December, Facebook estimates the number of profiles in Poland at 19,6-23,1 million, of which 18,3-21,6 million talk Polish (a clear increase), 1-1.2 million in the languages of the erstwhile USSR (i.e. a decrease of 100,000), 26.1-30,7 1000 talk languages of Southeast Asia (also a decrease - most likely seasonal workers in agriculture and construction returned home), 10-12 1000 in the languages of the Far East (Chinese, Japanese, Korean - a slight increase) and 13.1-15,4 1000 in Arabic or Persian (a slight decrease).
I can't find accurate data now, but if I remember correctly, erstwhile I did a akin experimentation a year ago, about 700,000 people spoke in these languages in Poland. This would fit, due to the fact that in Poland about 400-500 1000 adult refugees have arrived since.
