Poland issued more than 4 million visas to people from outside the EU between 2018 and 2023, according to an analysis by Polish commentator Jakub Dymek for the news portal Zero.pl. It is small towns rather than the metropolitan cities that have borne the brunt of the arrival of foreigners working in Poland, while the state has bowed to pressure from employers to make it easier for foreign workers to access the Polish labour market.
The latest data on foreigners living in Poland, published by Statistics Poland (GUS) in July, shows that major cities such as Warsaw (14.5 per cent) and Kraków (11.3 per cent) lag far behind towns such as Mszczonów (31.7 per cent) and Mława (27.8 per cent), both in Mazovia province, east-central Poland, with regard to the share of foreigners in the population.
GUS put the number of foreign nationals in Poland at about 2.3 million at the end of 2025, close to 6 per cent of the population. Ukrainians made up 73 per cent of them.
The first reason why the migrants are settling outside the main cities is that housing is cheaper there. Many of them commute to the metropolitan cities and work in their service sectors.
Second, it is provincial areas, and not the centres of Warsaw or Kraków, that host industries that require cheap workers for arduous and often low-paid work in discount stores, food processing plants and the furniture sector.
In the fruit-growing industry, there are companies that employ almost exclusively foreigners in the fruit harvest. One leading blueberry grower has said in interviews that after the introduction of the Family 500+ child benefit by the Law and Justice (PiS) government in 2016, he replaced Polish workers with migrants and that the latter came to make up 70 per cent of his labour force.
Foreigners working on projects for the fuel and energy giant Orlen, which is carrying out some of Poland’s largest investments, live in container towns near each one. One such village, built in 2023 beside the Olefins III petrochemical complex near Płock, central Poland, was designed to house about 6,000 workers.
Coverage of this has been scant in the Polish media, which prefers to concentrate on the failures of integration in Western capitals and security on Poland’s eastern border.
Despite the intense political debate about the threats posed by uncontrolled mass migration, Poland now attracts the largest number of labour migrants in the EU, overwhelmingly in a legal manner. According to Eurostat, Poland issued 337,874 first residence permits for employment reasons in 2024, more than any other member state, mainly to Ukrainians and Belarusians.
The fact that they are legal does not mean, though, that the migration is controlled by the state. It is rather a result of the activities of entrepreneurs, lobbying by industry and the work of temporary employment agencies.
This is continuing despite the fact that Poland’s politicians of the Right and the centre claim that the country is pursuing a tough migration policy, as it has learned the lessons from failures in western Europe.
The present centre-left government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk has tightened visa regulations and fortified the border with Belarus in the east to stop illegal migrants arriving. In March 2025 it also temporarily suspended the right to claim asylum for people crossing from Belarus.
In 2018-2023, the last five years of the PiS government, Poland issued over 4 million visas and 11.5 million documents legalising stays, including work permits.
In the months preceding the October 15, 2023 election, which PiS lost, the liberal opposition led by Donald Tusk attacked the government over a supposed “visa scandal” involving visas being issued in return for illicit payments. The affair cost deputy foreign minister Piotr Wawrzyk his job in August 2023.
The problem, though, lay elsewhere. There was pressure on consuls and Polish diplomatic missions to issue as many as possible, as quickly as possible, and to keep the visa refusal rate as low as possible.
Regulations and existing safeguards had to be bypassed to legalise the migration to Poland that entrepreneurs pressed for.
The effects of this phenomenon are visible primarily not in metropolitan areas but in smaller towns, where migrants find work in both the manufacturing and the service sectors. Small and medium-sized towns, where young people are leaving and good jobs are scarce, are becoming the largest concentrations of economic migration in Poland.
While the last government’s rhetoric concentrated on arguing that Poland needed to create high-tech and well-paid jobs, the country was actually pursuing a model of using cheap labour to give its companies a cost advantage on the EU market.
The earnings of Polish citizens have increased significantly in the last decade and, thanks to social benefits and the minimum hourly wage, Poles now enjoy a higher standard of living and have higher salary expectations.
Companies have, though, found a way to cope with the ageing population, rising social spending, wages and full employment by using migration to keep costs down and churn out affordable products. In this way Poland is acting in a similar manner to the guest worker model so prevalent in Germany decades ago.
Business and government seem to have struck an unwritten deal: In exchange for entrepreneurs’ agreement to rising wages and social benefits for Poles, the government would have a light-touch migration policy in which temporary employment agencies could supply the cheap labour Polish employers wanted.
By bringing Colombians, Indians, Africans and anyone else willing to work in Poland for much lower wages than Poles, companies and industries competing for cheap labour were able to maintain their position and even increase their profits.
As a result of these workers being accommodated near their place of employment, companies operated in concert with local governments and everything happened some distance from large cities. This avoided the attention of major media.
Employment agencies experienced a golden harvest because they earned money not only from the service provided to entrepreneurs but also from fees collected from workers brought to Poland.
The migrant workers have often ended up living five to a room, been charged for protective clothing, medical examinations and residence permits, and worked seven days a week, according to testimonies from Colombian workers published by the Polish weekly Tygodnik Powszechny.
Police have reported instances of human trafficking involving workers who ended up being employed by municipal transport companies in Silesia, southern Poland. There have also been numerous allegations made by the migrants about the practices of the agencies, including non-payment of wages and the withholding of travel documents.
There are more temporary employment agencies in Poland today than inspectors from the National Labour Inspectorate (PIP). The temporary employment sector in Poland numbers more than 700,000 workers employed in accordance with the law.
In 2025, PIP inspectors found irregularities at 95.8 per cent of the agencies they checked, according to figures the inspectorate supplied to the financial news portal Bankier.pl.
At the same time, with the current resources of PIP and the Border Guard, it is debatable whether there is any effective oversight of the work of employment agencies, who funds them and how they operate.
Today, online comments most often claim that agencies founded by foreigners themselves, such as Ukrainians, Belarusians and Georgians, are the major offenders, but the employment agencies may also be exploited by people smugglers who wish to blur the line between legal and illegal migration.
On May 7, the Border Guard announced the arrest of three partners – a Polish woman, a Ukrainian woman and a Belarusian man – who allegedly established about 130 fictitious companies to submit more than 11,000 false declarations of entrusting work to foreigners. Two were detained at the Kuźnica Białostocka-Bruzgi crossing on the Belarusian border and the third in Gdańsk.
These documents, according to the Border Guard, “constituted the basis for obtaining national visas and then crossing the border of Poland contrary to their actual purpose”.
It may not be easy to make those South Americans, Africans or Asians leave the country on time after their visas expire.
This model of operation in Poland has been described by Paweł Kaczmarczyk, director of the Centre of Migration Research at the University of Warsaw, as the “privatisation of migration”. Kaczmarczyk argues that the profits from the model have been privatised whereas the costs are socialised.
Dymek argues that while everyone says Poland should abandon the model of competition through cheap labour, the model it is pursuing is the opposite: A competitive model based on low costs and employee exploitation, with the state opening the door to cheap labour when employers so desire.
In smaller towns and more remote areas the arrival of migrants generates greater tensions and higher costs than in the metropolitan cities.
It is this that psephologists believe explains the rapid growth in the electorate of PiS’ rivals, such as the libertarian nationalist Confederation Liberty and Independence and the right-wing Confederation of the Polish Crown led by MEP Grzegorz Braun, in provincial areas where PiS used to dominate.
In the first round of the May 2025 presidential election, Confederation’s Sławomir Mentzen won 14.8 per cent of the vote and Braun 6.3 per cent.
Neither Confederation nor Braun’s party has been involved in government and both can therefore exploit PiS’ record on migration when it was in office.
There is of course an irony here. Confederation is a party that wants deregulation and a small state and is supportive of entrepreneurs, but it also has a clientele of young male voters who see migrants as rivals and a threat.
It is sectors such as fur farming, food processing, transport and logistics, which employ immigrants and compete thanks to relatively low labour costs, that find their most ardent defenders among the anti-establishment right-wing parties such as Confederation and the Polish Crown. Confederation urged President Karol Nawrocki to veto a ban on fur farming, which he signed in December 2025, giving farms until the end of 2033 to close.
This is why PiS and the breakaway Rozwój Plus (Development Plus) group led by former prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, which formed a separate parliamentary club on July 29, are now pursuing a strategy of calling for stricter regulations and a consciously implemented migration policy by the state, clearly defining the directions, industries and goals for accepting economic migrants to Poland.
Many would argue, though, that as in the case of western Europe they are proposing to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted.
