Across much of Central and Eastern Europe, locals exhibit a certain superiority toward their Western European neighbors in terms of immigration. It won’t happen here, it can’t happen here, goes the conventional wisdom. In Poland, this mindset increasingly conflicts with an uncomfortable reality: against the will of most Poles, Poland is becoming an immigration country. (RELATED: Is Poland the Next Victim of Mass Migration?)
The last weekend of May witnessed “Africa Days” in Lublin, Poland’s eighth-largest city, just over 50 miles from the Ukrainian border. The setting wasn’t incidental: Lublin has rapidly become a magnet for African migration. Zimbabweans have become the city’s third-largest foreign group, after Ukrainians and Belarusians. According to a Zimbabwean government minister, over 13,000 Zimbabweans now live in Poland, with many based in Lublin. Not only has an African community become established in Poland, but it can now muster a show of force like “Africa Days.”
As a half-century of European history demonstrates, many will have no intention of leaving.
The event drew national attention in part due to the comments of Wiktoria Herun, a Ukrainian woman working in the Lublin City Hall, in a recent podcast interview. Herun attributes the size of the migrant community to the “Study in Lublin” program launched in 2011 to encourage foreign students to enroll in the city’s universities. “The last six years have … been dominated by Africa — Zimbabwe, Nigeria, South Africa — but recently also Thailand and Saudi Arabia,” said Herun. “In the past, students would come alone; now, students from countries like Africa, India, and Bangladesh arrive with their families — with their husbands, wives, and children.” As a half-century of European history demonstrates, many will have no intention of leaving.
According to some estimates, there are as many Africans in Lublin today as there were in the entire country a decade ago. “Residents of Lublin, what is wrong with you, that you elect authorities who are filling your beautiful city with foreigners?” exclaimed Krzysztof Bosak, the deputy marshal of the Sejm (Parliament) and a member of the right-wing Confederation (Konfederacja) political alliance.
As if on cue, “Africa Days” ended with more controversy. In the wee hours of the morning after the festival’s conclusion, a Zimbabwean man struck a Polish man in the back of the head with a glass bottle at a bar. The victim sustained a severe wound requiring stitches and was reportedly diagnosed with a spinal injury. Nonetheless, police initially classified the incident as a low-level offense, meaning the perpetrator would not be subject to prison time or deportation proceedings. Michał Moskal, a parliamentarian of the conservative opposition Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość – PiS) party, announced a parliamentary inquiry into the matter; he subsequently reported the assailant would indeed be deported after the pressure campaign did its job.
The incident coincided with coverage of the Henry Nowak murder trial in Britain. Poles are cognizant of that young man’s Polish heritage and the case’s implications for their own society. Poles now leave Britain in greater numbers than they arrive, with 19,000 departing last year alone. Many cite the deterioration of British society from third-world mass migration as a reason for leaving. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: Henry Nowak, the Inevitable British Civil War, and What It Means for Us)
These societal developments are no longer foreign to Poland. In July 2025, a Venezuelan migrant murdered a young Polish woman in Toruń after a botched rape attempt. In April 2025, a Jamaican man stabbed and critically wounded a fellow passenger exiting a tram in Warsaw. In 2024, a Senegalese man sparked widespread conversation after he was filmed defecating in a reservoir in Katowice; he was later deported. In April, two Colombians were arrested at Warsaw Chopin Airport while they attempted to flee the country after an armed robbery. The previous month, another Colombian man severely beat a mother in Kutno. These were three of the more than 38,000 Colombians who received work permits in 2025 alone.
The political landscape is nuanced. Right-wing PiS, which led governments from 2015-23 and drew EU ire over its anti-migration rhetoric and resistance to Brussels-imposed migration schemes, surreptitiously admitted record numbers of foreigners, including many from third-world countries. Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his allies have eagerly mocked their opponents for this duplicity, but they do so from shaky ground. In 2024, Tusk’s government quietly announced the opening of 49 migrant settlement centers across the country. Knowing it is a losing issue among voters, the government postponed concrete action until after last summer’s presidential election. Likewise, EU officials have suspended efforts to relocate migrants to Poland in order not to hinder Tusk’s ruling coalition in next year’s parliamentary elections.
“A decade ago, the PiS government threw the doors wide open to immigrants from all over the world,” said Paweł Usiądek, a Confederation leader. “Today, Tusk’s team is granting them citizenship.” Bosak stated, “The logic of ‘open borders’ and ‘the more, the better’ is apparently doing just as well in Donald Tusk’s administration as it did in [former PiS Prime Minister] Mateusz Morawiecki’s.”
As this rhetoric suggests, the cupboard is not bare for the Polish anti-migration movement. Polish society does not need to build one from scratch, like Ireland or Iceland; nor does it need to breach a firewall, as in France or Germany. If PiS, Confederation, and the smaller Confederation of the Polish Crown all manage to clear the parliamentary threshold in next year’s elections and collaborate in a broad right-wing front (neither outcome is certain), they could pursue migration policies that would be the envy of Europe.
Business interests in Poland’s booming economy will have a say. In his new book, The Revolution of Ambition: How Is Poland Changing?, journalist Jakub Dymek asserts that subservience to American capital and pressure from domestic industries have led to a “privatization of migration” that is, in some respects, more destructive than equivalent policies in Western Europe. (RELATED: Towards the ‘Triumph of Free Trade’)
The NGO leviathan is similarly intractable. Several local NGOs funded Lublin’s “Africa Days.” The newly registered Foundation Black Justice Poland counts among its objectives “supporting the process of settling in Poland.” Its website describes “a Black-led foundation advancing the rights, dignity, and wellbeing of Black, African, and Afro-descendant communities in Poland.” The organization’s publicly reported funders include the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and FemFund (The Feminist Fund in Poland), which in turn receives money from the Open Society Foundations. Podlaskie OPH, which facilitates border crossings at the Belarusian frontier, has received grants from the Stefan Batory Foundation, one of the most significant institutional partners of the Open Society Foundations in Poland. Last year, former President Barack Obama posted a video featuring three new Obama Foundation Scholars working to “strengthen democracy in Hungary and Poland.”
Central European neighbors have showcased the difficulty of excising this NGO cancer. After the Slovakian parliament passed a law mandating NGO funding transparency last year, Britain, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands sent delegations to the Constitutional Court of Slovakia to lobby against the law they called “Russian-inspired.” The court ultimately struck down the law using questionable legal justifications. According to leaked transcripts from 2023, Hungarian NGO representatives taught Slovakian partners “how to circumvent the laws in Hungary necessary for the functioning of NGOs (e.g., how to change the names of projects and their composition so that they comply with legislation and subsequently draw funds for their purpose)”. Even the recently ousted Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán, armed with a parliamentary supermajority, was limited in its ability to confront private-equity funding trails. (RELATED: The Soros Footprint in Latin America)
Unless Poland charts a truly illiberal course, unaccountable business interests and NGOs are certain to continue overriding the Polish electorate.
For now, Poles are forced to confront their helplessness amid a rapidly changing society. National soccer teams are poor reflections of country demographics, but they do notably influence how soccer-mad Europeans view themselves. Poland won’t play in this summer’s World Cup, but among the team’s recent debutants are Maxi Oyedele and Michael Ameyaw — both of West African origin.
READ MORE from Michael O’Shea:
Towards the ‘Triumph of Free Trade’
Ireland Is a Democratic Late Starter
Michael O’Shea is an American-Polish writer and translator. He is a former visiting fellow at the Danube Institute in Budapest.
