Polish business groups urge government to “support legal, sustainable labour immigration”

A group of 11 leading business organisations in Poland have called on the government to “support legal, sustainable labour immigration” to compensate for the country’s difficult demographic situation.

“We wish to emphasise the importance of labour immigration for the growth of Poland’s prosperity,” write the signatories, which include the Business Centre Club, the Federation of Polish Entrepreneurs and the Lewiatan Confederation.

“Security is a non-negotiable value – however, it can be reconciled with a controlled, necessary openness to those foreigners who contribute to the creation of common wealth through their work,” they add.

They note that Poland currently enjoys historically low unemployment and a high professional activity rate. But this is in part “due to the demographic situation that is unfavourable for Poland”, they add.

The signatories point to labour shortages in many industries, including around 150,000 in the Polish IT sector and the same amount in transport. Other sectors in need of workers include manufacturing, construction and hospitality.

“Due to, among other things, the demographic problems mentioned above, which are structural and impossible to solve with simple, quick moves, neither the current nor future supply gaps in the labour market will be filled to a large extent by Poles. There will be too few of us,” they write.

“At the same time, it is not only the needs of business that will grow, but also the pressure on the social security system, healthcare and other public services,” they add. “To effectively resolve these tensions, we have and will have no choice but to continue to benefit from legal labour immigration.”

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Last year, Poland recorded the largest population decline in the European Union, of 133,000. In relative terms – measuring the size of the decline in relation to the overall population – Poland had the bloc’s second-largest drop of 0.36%.

That was Poland’s sixth consecutive year of decline. Since 2018, the last year that Poland saw population growth, its population has decreased by more than 1.35 million, Eurostat data show.

In 2022, Poland also recorded the sixth lowest fertility rate in EU, at 1.29 live births per woman, below the EU average of 1.46 and significantly below the so-called replacement level of 2.1 at which enough babies are born to sustain population levels.

At the same time, in recent years, the number of foreign workers in Poland has grown rapidly as the country experienced strong economic growth paired with labour shortages. Poland has issued more residence permits to non-EU immigrants than any other EU member states for the last six years running.

Most of the new arrivals have come from neighbouring Ukraine and Belarus, though there are also growing numbers from Asia and South America.

The number of foreigners registered in Poland’s social insurance system (known as ZUS) rose six-fold between 2015 and 2023, from less than 200,000 to 1.13 million.

ZUS, however, warns that this will not be enough to maintain Poland’s current ratio of working-age population to retirees. To achieve that, Poland needs to attract at least two million foreign workers within a decade – a goal ZUS admits is “unrealistic”.

While immigrants have arrived in Poland in record numbers in recent years, politicians have often expressed hostility towards some forms of immigration, especially in the light of the ongoing migration crisis on the border with Belarus.

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Donald Tusk declared that “the survival of Western civilisation” depends on preventing “uncontrolled migration”.

Main image credit: ignartonosbg / Pixabay

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.