Europe's 'Last Bastion' Quietly Took In More Migrants Than Anyone; Now The Backlash Hits Warsaw

Poland's nationalists marched through Warsaw on Wednesday under the slogan "Polak w Polsce gospodarzem!" - "A Pole is the master in Poland!" (translated) - as the annual Independence March sets off, with organizers claiming up to half a million marchers. President Karol Nawrocki took part "as every year" (translated), with Polexit and the fight over the Constitutional Tribunal overarching themes.The march came four days after a gunman killed six people in Kraków's Main Market Square. Prosecutors say they have not established his motive, though Interior Minister Marcin Kierwiński described the killer's views as ultra-nationalist, a label that, as we reported, has been challenged.According to Statistics Poland (GUS) data published in July, Poland had around 2.3 million foreign residents at the end of 2025, almost 6% of the population, 73% of them Ukrainian. Foreigners now make up 14.5% of Warsaw's population and 19.5% of Wrocław's.Most of them arrived under the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government, which ran Poland from 2015 to 2023. Poland issued more first residence permits to non-EU nationals than any other EU country for six years running, from 2017 to 2022, according to Eurostat, peaking at 967,345 in 2021: a third of the EU's total and more than twice as many as any other member state. Some 82% of them were for work.The same GUS register data put foreigners at 53.5% of the 3,461 people living in Mikstat, a small town in Greater Poland, which would make it the first place in Poland where they outnumber Poles. Fact-checkers at TVP Info disputed that, pointing to GUS data and the municipality's own statistics. GUS calls the method experimental and the figures unofficial.Most of Mikstat's newcomers work at its large meat-processing plant, UnHerd found: Ukrainians first, then Moldovans, Nepalis and Latin Americans. A 29-year-old Venezuelan there told the outlet he crossed Panama's Darién Gap hoping to reach the US before an agency found him a work contract in Poland. In October, members of the ultranationalist All-Polish Youth unveiled a banner in the town square and put up posters on what mass migration does to crime and wages, filming it for a video. Nawrocki, elected in 2025 with PiS's backing, told a Warsaw summit in June that Poland must avoid "the mistakes of Western countries, which replaced the demographic crisis with mistakes in migration policy" (translated). "This is not, and will not be, the Polish path," he said (translated), offering "a clear focus on the Polish family" (translated) instead. In 2023 the state pension insurer ZUS calculated that Poland would need about 1.8 million more foreign workers by 2032 to hold its 2022 ratio of dependents to working-age people, a target it called "unrealistic."Prime Minister Donald Tusk's coalition, in power since December 2023 and facing parliamentary elections next year, has cut visas sharply. Poland issued 16,000 work visas in the first quarter of 2026, down 87% from 123,000 in the same quarter of 2022, and deported about 2,700 foreigners in the quarter against some 900 four years earlier.The Interior Ministry said in June: "the state has regained control over who enters Poland, for what purpose, and who must leave the country." Poland's first residence permits fell for a fourth straight year in 2025, to 467,314, third in the EU behind Spain and Germany.Statistics Poland still counted 1.14 million foreigners working in Poland at the end of 2025, 7.2% more than a year earlier and almost 7% of the workforce, with Colombians (up 21.3%) and Indians (up 9.1%) the fastest-growing groups.