The EconomistFebruary 22nd 2020 Europe 55F
or a glimpseof how immigration is changing Poland, head to
Hala Koszyki, an Instagram-friendly food hall in the middle of
Warsaw. Take an Uber and there is a good chance the driver will be
from Belarus. Inside, Ukrainian waiters and chefs toil over sushi
and tapas. Outside, straddling their scooters, a group of UberEats
riders from India and elsewhere in South Asia wait to take orders
from any Varsovians who fancy a night in.
Poland, one of the eu’s most homogenous countries, is becom-
ing a country of immigration. It took in more workers from outside
the euin 2018 than any other country—nearly five times more than
Germany—and is likely to have repeated the trick again in 2019.
Nearly 2m Ukrainians have arrived since 2014, pushed by a ropy
national economy and a war in the country’s east, and pulled by
higher wages in Poland. They are not alone. In the past three years
36,000 Nepalese, 20,000 Indians and 18,000 Bangladeshis have
moved to Poland. It is a big shift: Poland, a country of 38m inhabit-
ants, had only 100,000 foreigners of any stripe in 2011. Migration is
seen as a political faultline in the eu, with an open west set against
a closed east. Yet Poland is, quietly, starting to look more like its
peers in western Europe.
Unfortunately, Poland is being a bit too European about it.
Western Europe turned to immigration during the post-war eco-
nomic boom. Unemployment plunged from about 8% in the 1930s
to 3% in the 1950s and barely 1.5% in the early 1960s, triggering a la-
bour shortage. Poland is enjoying a similar economic surge now.
Unemployment, which peaked at 20% shortly before it joined the
euin 2004, is just over 3% today. Facing the same problem,
Poland’s nationalist Law and Justice (pis) government has tacitly
arrived at the same solution: immigration. Public policy ought to
benefit from second-mover advantage. Governments can observe
and avoid the mistakes made by others. When it comes to immi-
gration, western Europe offers plenty of lessons. Yet Warsaw
seems to be ignoring them and enthusiastically repeating other
countries’ cock-ups.
The first error is a belief that temporary workers will remain
temporary. Citizens of Ukraine, Belarus and some other former
Soviet countries can work for up to six months in Poland without a
visa. Polish officials refer blithely to Ukrainians working in the“grey market” and paying no social insurance. Tricky questions,
such as how to integrate new arrivals, are ducked. Why bother
thinking about such things if the newcomers will soon go home?
Similar “guest worker” schemes have been tried before. Germany
welcomed about 2m guest workers from the 1950s to the 1970s.
When many turned out to be permanent, the government decided
not to kick them out. Former chancellor Willy Brandt, a Social
Democrat, said doing so would be “irresponsible, inhumane and
entirely uneconomical”. Poland’s ruling party would have fewer
qualms over deportation. But its leaders might be deterred by the
expense and the damage to the economy.
Another mistake is the assumption that since (apart from the
Ukrainians) migrants are relatively few, they will not be noticed by
Polish voters. Small numbers can have a big impact. In 2019 Poland
granted long-term visas to about 24,000 people from Nepal, India
and Bangladesh, according to the Polish Economic Institute, a
think-tank. By comparison, Britain accepted migrants from the
Caribbean at an annual rate of about 16,000 in the 1950s. With a
population of 52m at the time, Britain was hardly swamped. But it
was enough to trigger the rise of racial politics. In 1955 Winston
Churchill suggested “Keep England White” as an election slogan.
Some Polish officials think they need not worry about integra-
tion because Ukrainians are culturally very similar to Poles. They
look the same, are mostly Christian and speak similar languages.
However, similarities are an imperfect shield against prejudice.
White, Christian, football-mad lager drinkers were hardly a rare
breed in Britain before the arrival of hundreds of thousands of
Poles in the noughties. Yet a backlash against immigration from
eastern Europe boosted support for Brexit, which upended British
politics. Confederation, a far-right Polish party, is crusading
against foreign workers. Its mps bluntly state that national
“purity” matters more than prosperity. So far, there is little inter-
est: an anti-Ukrainian march by another party in 2018 drew only 10
people. But Poland has not tasted recession for nearly a generation,
and who knows what might happen if the economy were to stall.
In any case, Poland may not be able to rely on an influx of Ukrai-
nian workers for long. An improving Ukrainian economy and loos-
er German immigration rules, which come into force in March,
may encourage youngsters in Kharkiv to turn elsewhere. Business-
es are already looking farther afield to plug gaps. Personnel Ser-
vice, a Polish recruitment agency, is opening an office in Singapore
to manage workers from Asia. The kind of Poles who object to for-
eigners tend not to hang out in swanky food halls in central War-
saw. But the arrival of, say, 150 Nepalese or Indonesian workers in a
factory in a small town in eastern Poland might grab their atten-
tion. Rapid ethnic change can upset domestic politics very quickly,
as mainstream parties in western Europe have found.Noisy populists, quiet globalists
The Polish government’s most quintessentially European trait,
when it comes to migration, is its unwillingness to discuss the top-
ic and, more important, to make a case for it. Perhaps this is be-
cause the government is more hypocritical than most. pisis one of
Europe’s most illiberal governing parties, yet it has one of its most
liberal immigration policies. It is like a dirty secret. When one
minister admitted that immigration was necessary for the Polish
economy to keep zooming along, he was fired. Like its neighbours
to the west, Poland’s government has opted for a combination of
naivety, deceit and hope that things will sort themselves out. Per-
haps it is just the European way. But it is unlikely to work. 7Charlemagne How to mess up immigration
Poland is repeating the mistakes of other European countries