According to the EWL Group employment agency and the University of Warsaw's Centre for East European Studies, which conducted the research, the language barrier and the time-consuming bureaucracy do not discourage those seeking employment in the country.
“Their number (migrants from Asia and Latin America) has gone up several times over the last five years,” revealed the survey, titled ‘Poland in a global struggle for talents from Asia and Latin America.’
In 2019, the number of work permits granted to employees from Asia and Latin America totaled fewer than 55,000 while in 2023 the figure soared to 275,000; a five-fold increase.
Jan Malicki, director of the Centre for East European Studies, highlighted at a presentation of the survey’s findings on Monday that in 2011, Poland hosted around 110,000 foreign nationals with the number having risen to over 2 million a decade later.
The researchers found that in the case of Latin American migrant workers, the growth dynamic had been as high as more than 20-fold between 2019 and 2023.
“There has been a complete change of trend,” Malicki said. “Before our eyes, Poland has changed from a country of emigration to a country of immigration.”
He added that the trend iswas expected to continue.
“Currently, Warsaw is returning to the beauty, to the majesty that it had in the 1930s,” Malicki continued. “So it took 90 years – that’s what the German destruction, the destruction of Warsaw by the Germans in the Second World War and the communist governments imposed by Moscow cost Poland, cost Warsaw, our capital.”
Malicki also said the only threat to continued growth of the immigration trend was war.
The president of EWL Group, Andrzek Korkus, attributed Poland’s attractiveness in part to its record low unemployment rate, despite the economic slowdown.
“We have record low unemployment, a record number of people are working in the Polish economy, and in addition, last year we had record low economic growth, so despite its weak condition, our economy, our labor market, is exuberant,” he said.
Of the foreign newcomers to Poland, 75 percent are men with an average age of 35, the research showed. They work chiefly in the industrial production, agriculture and construction sectors.
