Poland’s Christian Migrants

Jul 20, 2018 by

by Filip Mazurczak, First Things:

Across the West, an electoral backlash against large-scale immigration has contributed to the successes of populist movements and politicians: Brexit in Britain, Donald Trump in the United States, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and Matteo Salvini in Italy. The government of Poland, which since 2015 has been led by the conservative Law and Justice Party, is often viewed as part of this transatlantic anti-immigrant trend. But this perception is simplistic. Poland’s government, along with much of Polish society, is in fact pro-immigration. What is true is that Poland eschews the policies of Western European multiculturalism—by encouraging immigration selectively, from countries with similar cultural values.

In 2016, according to Eurostat, Poland issued 586,000 first residence permits to nationals of non–European Union countries. Poland issued more such permits that year than did any other EU member-state except Britain—and more than Germany (505,000), which has more than double Poland’s population.

The vast majority of these non-EU migrants have come from the former Soviet Union, especially from Ukraine, a nation plagued by war, poverty, and corruption. (Belarusians are a distant second.) In late 2017, 1.45 million Ukrainians were working legally in Poland. In a country of 38 million, that amounts to nearly 4 percent of the population, and between 4 and 6 percent of the workforce. One in ten inhabitants of Wroclaw, the fourth largest Polish city, is Ukrainian. It’s impossible for a Polish speaker to visit Poland without noticing advertisements in Cyrillic, and vast numbers of cashiers, waiters, and building contractors who speak with “eastern” accents. Increasingly, Roman Catholic parishes are making their churches available to Ukrainian priests so that they can celebrate the Greek Catholic liturgy.

The rapid increase in the number of Ukrainians in Poland has not sparked nativism. An October 2017 poll reveals that 88 percent of Poles are not afraid that Ukrainian immigrants will take their jobs. On the other side of the border, a recent poll shows that 50 percent of Ukrainians have a “warm” attitude towards Poland, making it the foreign country Ukrainians like most. As speakers of a Slavic tongue, Ukrainians learn Polish quickly. The soaring number of Polish-Ukrainian marriages is evidence that Ukrainians assimilate well in Poland.

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