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

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Poland built its reputation as Europe's fortress against migration. Under PiS, it quietly handed out more residence permits than any other EU country... Now the backlash is marching...

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.

Nawrocki, elected in 2025 with PiS's backing, told a Warsaw summit in June that Poland must avoid "the mistakes of Western countries…

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