Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki is determined to oppose a European Union plan to share the burden of migrants and asylum seekers across the continent. He says his country wants to make sure “Poles can walk safely in the streets” so it doesn’t take in foreigners – it doesn’t want to.
At the same time, in central Poland, a small village of just 200 people is preparing for the arrival of 6,000 workers from Asia in a huge, newly built housing complex. The workers are needed by an oil company controlled by Mr Morawiecki’s right-wing government.
State-controlled oil company PKN Orlen needs them to build a new petrochemical plant that is critical to its expansion plans. About 100 have already arrived, and the rest will follow soon, far outnumbering the residents of the village of Biala.
“Some people say it’s a bit too much and they’re worried,” said Krzysztof Szczawinski, the elected leader of Biała and one of five local farmers who agreed to lease their land for the new housing development and construction camp.
Jakub Zgorzelski, a manager who runs the sprawling foreign labor camp, said he had no trouble persuading local farmers to abandon their crops and lease their land for the workers’ compound. One initially asked for more money and refused, but finally agreed for fear of missing out on the money. “Money speaks loudest,” said Mr. Zgorzelksi.
Mr Morawiecki dismissed the European Union’s efforts to get member states to take in some of the migrants arriving by sea from North Africa to Greece and Italy, denouncing a “dictate aimed at culturally transforming Europe”.
In order for Orlen’s expansion plans to stay on course, however, cultural differences had to be taken into account.
The foreign labor camp in Biala was built in just a few months from 2,500 modules that look like shipping containers with windows. It has four separate kitchens to cater to the particular and decidedly non-Polish dietary needs of workers – Filipinos, who share the Roman Catholic faith of most Poles but not their penchant for cabbage and potatoes, Hindus from India, and a large group of Muslims from India Bangladesh, Pakistan and Turkmenistan who do not eat pork, a Polish staple.
Poland’s economy is picking up now that the coronavirus lockdowns have ended, but the stock of working-age people is shrinking and, like much of Europe, it faces desperate labor shortages. But if you look at the violent unrest that rocked France after the shooting dead of a French teenager of Algerian and Moroccan descent in late June, you can see more reasons to curb immigration.
The riots “are the consequences of the policy of uncontrolled migration,” Poland’s prime minister said this month. “We don’t want scenes like that on Polish streets,” Mr Morawiecki added, using the uproar to attack the government’s liberal critics ahead of the crucial election for a new parliament in October.
Neither the ruling Law and Justice party nor the main opposition force, the Civic Platform, want to be seen as soft on immigration, but both want the economy to keep growing, which requires finding new workers from abroad.
Poland has the largest economy in Eastern and Central Europe (excluding Russia), but one of the fastest shrinking populations among the 27 members of the European Union.
Slawomir Wawrzynski, the head of the relatively prosperous district, which includes the village of Biala, other small settlements and a huge oil factory, lamented that labor shortages have hampered local development. “We have money to build roads and buildings, but we don’t have the manpower to do the work,” he said. “We need foreign workers.”
Orlen, the state-controlled oil company, handed the new plant project, which is expected to cost more than $3 billion, into the hands of a South Korean-Spanish engineering consortium, which in turn sought cheap labor from Asia to complement hard-to-find Polish workers worker.
A welder from Lucknow in northern India said he was paid three dollars an hour – far more than he was making in India but half the Polish minimum wage. He said he encountered no hostility from the Polish population and felt more welcome in Poland than at a previous job in Algeria.
Orlen, controlled by a government notorious for fomenting xenophobic sentiment, is now making funds available to support a local police-sponsored anti-discrimination campaign.
The campaign, dubbed “Respect has no colour,” is a far cry from the message of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who ahead of the 2015 election warned voters that his opponents were opening the floodgates to migrants Carriers of “very dangerous diseases that have long since disappeared in Europe” including “all kinds of parasites and protozoa”.
The party has pushed back some of its most vicious xenophobic messages but still presents itself as the only reliable defender of Polish values and culture against unwelcome intruders, be they bureaucrats in Brussels or desperate migrants sneaking into Europe in search of a better life want .
The War in Ukraine sent more than a million refugees, almost exclusively women and children, to Poland. But that ultimately exacerbated the labor shortage because many Ukrainian men those who worked on Polish construction sites and factories have returned home to fight. And the general decline in population means that the number of Poles willing to do manual labor is shrinking.
“This is a very big problem. You can’t change demographics,” said Piotr Poplawski, chief economist at ING Bank in Warsaw. Container storage for foreign workers, he added, “is currently an exception, but will most likely be the future” as Poland looks for new workers abroad.
The container city in Biala is surrounded by a high metal fence and includes a police station with barred detention cells. Asian workers, said Mr. Zgorzelski, the site manager, can come and go as they please until the project is complete, but most will leave Poland once their contracts expire. “This is not a refugee camp, but a workers’ shelter,” he said.
Marek Martynowski, a law and justice senator representing the region where the new plant is located, said his party welcomes foreign workers as long as they enter legally and are not “young men who come here to get social benefits “.
The thousands of workers hired to build Orlen’s new plant, he said, “are workers, not migrants, and we definitely need workers.”
He acknowledged that his party sometimes used “harsh words” against foreigners, but said that “everyone uses harsh rhetoric before elections”.
The Polish government’s anger at the European bloc’s plan to redistribute migrants is largely an expression of pre-election posturing: Brussels hasn’t asked for it to take anyone in and is likely to offer Poland money to pay for the many Ukrainians who are has accommodated to compensate.
The opposition has also used immigration to score political points, accusing the government of stoking concerns about migrants while tacitly allowing large inflows of foreign workers from countries like Pakistan, Iran and Nigeria.
“Why does Kaczynski set dogs on foreigners and immigrants at the same time when he wants to let in hundreds of thousands of them from such countries?” asked Donald Tusk, the main opposition leader. He said he too was shocked by the “violent riots” in France and said the ruling party was fueling potential trouble by “bringing more than 130,000 citizens from such countries into the country last year”.
The state-owned oil company, which has been caught in the crossfire, has struggled to reassure the public that it has not been lenient towards migrants, insisting it has not hired any Asian workers itself and has left all hiring decisions to contractors. Daniel Obajtek, CEO of Orlen, told Polish Radio: “These people come, quit their jobs and go – they don’t come with their families, they won’t stay in Poland.”
Anatol Magdziarz contributed to reporting from Warsaw.
