A leaked draft of a new Polish migration policy discriminates against Muslims, ranks foreigners according to ethnicity and breaches human rights, critics say.
A leaked copy of the draft policy was published in full (in Polish) in June by the Association for Legal Intervention rights group.
The Polish Helsinki Foundation, a human rights non-governmental organisation, said in a statement that the “conditions related to worldview and religion are a gross violation of fundamental freedoms and human rights”.
Asked by BIRN about the leaked document, an interior ministry spokesman did not deny its authenticity.
“Currently, work is undertaken on a draft document, which will include the proposal for Poland’s migration policy,” he said. “When the project is ready, it will be made available for public and inter-ministerial consultations.”
He added: “When it comes to the migration policy, the Ministry of Interior and Administration systematically represents the position of the government and of [the ruling] Law and Justice [party], which has not changed in the last four years.”
Fierce anti-migrant rhetoric helped Law and Justice (PiS) gain power in 2015. During campaigning that year, PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski infamously said that migrants “bring parasites and protozoa”.
Desperate for workers
Poland’s migration policy has been in limbo since the nationalist-populist government scrapped the previous one in 2016.
In the meantime, despite PiS’ anti-immigrant bluster, the country has become one of the EU’s biggest magnets for migrants from outside the bloc.
According to Eurostat, Poland issued 680,000 first residency permits in 2017 — the highest number for any EU country. Of these, 580,000 permits were for Ukrainians.
Around 1.2 million Ukrainian workers come to Poland every year, say experts at the Polish National Bank. Most come to work for a few months, with 800,000 active in the labour market at any given time.
Leaving war and a dire economy, Ukrainian workers have helped fill a hole in the Polish labour market left by Poland’s demographic crisis, caused by emigration, low birth rates and an ageing population.
Poland is desperate for workers. Half of Polish employers interviewed for a survey in 2018 said they cannot fill vacancies.
Poland has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the EU, at 3.9 per cent in June, according to Eurostat.
In the near future, Poland needs a significant strengthening of the labour supply.
The interior ministry estimates that by 2030, employers will have trouble filling one in five jobs, with a shortage of around four million employees in both highly skilled and manual professions.
Experts say Ukrainians readily take up jobs that Poles do not want — often in agriculture, construction or domestic work. Many accept positions they are overqualified for and see their rights as workers trampled.
Ukrainians tend to learn Polish easily and feel culturally close to Poles, with whom they share a common history. The Polish National Bank says their earnings are slowly increasing too, as many move from manual to service jobs.
According to interior ministry data, three-quarters of Ukrainian workers coming to Poland do not intend to stay long-term. Poland has made it easy for Ukrainians to come for short-term contracts, but long-term residency is not easy to get.
Geographic proximity means that many Ukrainians can commute back and forth to keep up with families back home rather than moving to Poland for good.
Recently announced changes to German labour law have led experts to speculate that some Ukrainian workers may be drawn further West (the National Bank experts say that up to a fourth of Ukrainians in Poland might leave for Germany).
Poland is one of the fastest growing economies in the EU, but experts say maintaining this pace means keeping Ukrainians in the country and bringing in more migrants from elsewhere.
‘Favoured’ immigrants
The leaked draft migration policy concedes that Poland does need migrants — a taboo conclusion for many Polish politicians.
“In the near future, Poland needs a significant strengthening of the labour supply,” it says at the outset.
Beyond this admission, critics say the document strays into morally — and practically — ambiguous territory.
Poland’s vision for migration, according to the draft, implies an ethnically and religiously based ranking of “favoured” people who would be encouraged to come and work in Poland with varying degrees of welcome.
At the top of the hierarchy are Poles who migrated abroad after the fall of communism in 1989 and have the right to return without restriction. Then there are ethnic Poles ready for “repatriation”, especially from families who found themselves outside Poland’s new borders at the end of World War II.
Next are migrants from Ukraine, Belarus and other former Soviet countries, who would ideally come periodically in and out of Poland for seasonal or temporary jobs.
At the bottom of the pile are long-term immigrants from elsewhere who would be forced into a policy of integration and assimilation.
Poland seeks to create a ranking of countries of origin of migrants outside the EU and link the number of visas and residency permits granted to the score of the country on the list, according to the draft.
Criteria to be used in the ranking include cultural, linguistic and religious similarities, links to Poland, the existence of radical political or religious groups, internal conflicts in society, crime levels, poverty levels and the epidemiological situation.
Critics fear the result could be a de facto travel ban on people from specific countries, much like the one that US President Donald Trump tried to impose on Muslim countries in 2017.
The document describes Poland as an ethnically homogeneous country in which 99 per cent of residents are Polish citizens.
It then argues that this homogeneity necessitates a migration policy based on integration and assimilation, as opposed to multiculturalism, to prevent social conflict, insecurity and terrorism.
Multiculturalism a ‘fiasco’
It claims multiculturalism has been a “fiasco” in other societies, leading to “the emergence of cultural enclaves, ethnic ghettos, alternative legal and moral systems, an increase in the level of aggression against indigenous people, the negation of the value system in the host country, including values stemming from the dominant religion”.
To avoid these alleged pitfalls, the draft policy proposes making the right to long-term residency — and eventual naturalisation — conditional on completing integration and assimilation courses, leading to the adoption of undefined “Polish values”.
To show their determination to stay in the country, migrants would have to pay for these courses out of their own pockets.
“An important aspect of the assimilation programmes will be their deepened axiological and socialising aspect, i.e., the ability of the foreigner to accept and assume as their own the values in force in Poland, including those related to worldview, religion, politics, culture, habits etc. and to become a fully formed member of Polish society,” the leaked draft says.
“The lack of such an ability should result in a refusal to grant Polish citizenship.”
The Polish Helsinki Foundation said that expecting would-be citizens to adopt values from a country’s dominant religion is a breach of freedom of religion and conscience, which are basic human rights.
The conditions related to worldview and religion are a gross violation of fundamental freedoms and human rights.
“While the demand to comply with national law should be considered legitimate, and knowing the language, culture and history are undoubtedly factors contributing to integration, the other conditions related to worldview and religion are a gross violation of fundamental freedoms and human rights,” it said.
The document does not make clear what “Polish values” are or what it means to assume them as their own.
Critics note that Polish society is not monolithic on worldview, religion or politics. They interpret the assumption of homogeneity as evidence that by “Polish values”, the authors of the policy mean Polish values as defined by the current government.
Muslims singled out
While the long-term residency and citizenship criteria are a cause for alarm, analysts say the section about Muslim people is downright discriminatory.
“It seems that particular difficulties are connected with the admission and integration of Muslim believers,” the draft says. “Muslims are often incapable of integration, as they emphasise their own distinctiveness and superiority over the local community, and as a consequence build ‘parallel societies’ in the host countries.”
The document describes a “civilisational war” between Western culture and the “Islamic project”, which allegedly seeks to create a global Islamic culture, and looks at all Muslim migrants as potentially involved with this “project”.
While it notes that Muslim migrants now in Poland have not been seen to form “compact communities” where such tendencies are observed, it concludes that “the biggest challenge in the coming years in Poland is to counteract the phenomenon of radicalisation of some Muslim believers and not to allow them to create ‘parallel societies’.”
Lawyers from the Helsinki Foundation said that sections concerning Muslim migrants were particularly xenophobic.
“The threats that migrants of this religion are allegedly sure to bring are elaborated on a few pages of the document,” they wrote. “Islam is presented as a monolith, narrowed down to its most radical variety, and Muslims as demanding people, imposing their values, often committing crimes and incapable of integration.”
According to Ukrainian journalist Olena Babakova, who analysed the document for the left-wing Krytyka Polityczna magazine portal, the leaked draft policy looks at migrants as “exotic peasants who after hard, taxed and boozy work are allowed to settle, but only after they have renounced their identity and religion for the Polish and Catholic ones”.
Migrants might as well move to Germany, where they are not treated like “intruders”, Babakova adds.
Witold Klaus, from the Center for Migration Studies at Warsaw University, writes that the text is “xenophobic, based on fear and trying to generate fear among readers, as well as detached from reality”.
As critics wait for the interior ministry to release an official version of the draft new policy, they say they hope for serious debate on migration — though some fear PiS will try to pass legislation without proper public scrutiny, as it has done in the past with other controversial measures.
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