We wanted to be part of the global West and benefit from its prosperity. And it happened. We are the West, an island of prosperity in the great ocean of global poverty. But this comes at a price.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
When does a migrant become a "migrant"? When he is undesirable. The characteristic of a migrant is that he is poor, hungry and migrates to eat our bread.
Migrants are accused of not being poor enough or even too rich to deserve a place in our society. After all, they had enough money to pay for a plane to Minsk or a boat to Lampedusa. But when someone sells his family home and all his possessions to pay for a trip he may not survive, is he rich? Often the price buys the possibility of avoiding prison, torture or death. Someone who can afford to buy himself out of death is indeed relatively rich - because there is nothing more valuable than life. A ticket to a world where no one starves to death, where one doesn't have to walk miles every day with a jug to fetch water, must be expensive.
People have always migrated to places where the soil is more fertile and the climate milder. We also migrated in pursuit of wealth. It was through our gold rush that conquered and enslaved the countries from which today poor people emigrate. It is we Europeans who have plundered these countries. We justified our bandit assaults, called "discoveries" or more overtly, "conquests" for the sake of disguise, with a mission of Christianization. We Westerners made the indigenous peoples of the Americas a hell on Earth under the guise of saving their souls.
Hatuey, the leader of the Cuban tribes rebelling against the Spanish invasion, was already standing at the stake when he was offered baptism. That way you will avoid hell, the missionary explained. And where will the Spaniards go after they die? - asked the chief. To heaven, replied the monk. Then I'd rather go to hell," replied Hatuey, and the pyre was set on fire.
Today we have new pretexts for invading other countries. By bombing and murdering, we are supposedly carrying democracy to them. For only when, after the armed intervention of the white armies of the West, a regime favorable to us prevails in some country of the global South, will we be free to rob that country of its wealth.
That this is not about democracy, but only about supremacy and exploitation, is evidenced by both the results and our allies. In the Middle East, we are represented by Israel, which is wreaking death and havoc throughout the region. Its leader Netanyahu is being prosecuted by the International Criminal Court for genocide - like Vladimir Putin. The West's other regional ally is the most heinous, fundamentalist Saudi regime - where executions are still being carried out by the sword.
How would life in the countries of the global South have turned out had it not been for the West's civilization missions? This we do not know. One thing is certain, as a result of its conquests, the West became unconsciously wealthy, while the conquered, colonized countries became poorer. It is estimated that the conquest and colonization of the Americas led to the holocaust of 90 million indigenous people. In the Congo, King Leopold's regime slaughtered an estimated one million Congolese, and as recently as 1958, during the Brussels World's Fair, people with black skin were shown in the Brussels Zoo in cages, alongside "other animals."
As a result of our interventions, falsely called the "clash of civilizations," the Islamic world has regressed to the Middle Ages - just compare the photos of Kabul, Damascus and Baghdad from the 1970s with those of today. Today, almost all of the women in these photos have their heads covered, precisely like European women in the Middle Ages.
Opponents of migration point to economic reasons driving people taking the risky decision and storming the wall the West has surrounded itself with. They claim that peoples migrating in search of a better life are trying to steal our prosperity.
How we know it. Polish peasants migrated en masse to Brazil because of land hunger, hoping for just such a better life. But not only peasants: "In the early 1890s, many Pabianians decided to leave for Brazil. Like the residents of Lodz and Lodz County, they succumbed to the compelling vision of a better life overseas. They ran into a veritable amok. They left Pabianice as if hypnotized, unaware of the hardships and dangers threatening them. No warnings or admonitions had any effect. The emigrants were looking for a new promised land at all costs," writes Slawomir Saladaj on the Pabianice City Hall website.
Poland, like the countries of the global South, was also a country conquered and systematically ruined by the partitioners. And so, for the same reasons, masses of people emigrated from Poland to the West, ot seeking a better life in Munich, New York or Vancouver.
And finally, after joining the European Union, the younger generation of Poles again fled poverty and unemployment to the West, mainly to the UK, seeking to improve their material status. As many as 2.5 million people, 6.5 percent of Poland's population, emigrated in 2017. It is to them that our country owes the sustained decline in the unemployment rate.
Whoever condemns migration for bread suffers from a syndrome of double morality: we are allowed, but not them. why? Because we are afraid of them, because we feel aversion to them because of their racial, religious, cultural distinctiveness. Finally, because we don't have the slightest intention of sharing our prosperity. In turn, poor people see "migrants" as competitors for scarce welfare benefits.
Such pettiness, however, does not go down well either in the salons or in the annals of the Polish nation, so we have to explain ourselves somehow. We therefore state: let those at fault share. We did not have any colonies. And here an important contradiction is marked. It is true that we did not participate in the British, Spanish, Portuguese or French conquests. (Napoleon sent thousands of Polish legionaries to help put down a slave uprising in Haiti, but a great many of them went over to the Haitian side and turned bayonets against the colonizers).
However, we became part of the colonizing West when our soldiers jointly invaded Iraq and Afghanistan with the Yankees. At the time, the military talked about "proving ourselves in combat conditions," while politicians talked about the expected economic benefits. We even hoped for an oil field in Iraq.
We were very eager to be part of the global West and have its prosperity become ours. And the West has taken us in. Only that it comes at a price. Today Alexander Kwasniewski considers our participation in the aggression against Iraq a mistake. The former president explains himself by saying that it was then that we were accepted into NATO and we had to repay the Americans somehow, even if most Poles were against sending our troops to Iraq.
Why are we afraid of illegal immigrants, but not afraid of a Palestinian doctor taking us in on a night call, an Egyptian serving kebabs on the corner or a Pakistani bringing us a meal on a scooter? Because these have already found a place in our division of labor. They do these lower-paying and more thankless jobs, and the illegals probably won't do it, they'll probably isolate themselves, live on benefits and impose their religion and culture on us.
Yes, this is what happens in Western European countries, where unemployment is high and immigrants are cordoned off in urban ghettos like in France - but not with us. We are short of labor, and the Polish social security fund was just saved by Ukrainian immigrants, because they took jobs in large numbers and paid insurance premiums. Now, however, Ukrainians are going further West, and someone will have to replace them in Poland.
When I went to elementary school, there were 45 male and female students in a class. Now classes are three times less. Our labor market has been drained by emigration and demographic decline. An influx of labor from the countries of the global South is therefore the logical - and probably the only - solution.
Why do you think Western European countries at one point opened their labor markets to Poles? Because they needed us. Precisely in those mediocre jobs, because young Poles were also building the prosperity of Great Britain or Germany.
If Poland had overpopulation and high unemployment, no one would have pushed here. But it happened. We are the West, an island of prosperity in the great ocean of world poverty. Although there is no shortage of poor in our country, because our high income is very unevenly distributed, but poverty is unequal to poverty. For many newcomers, drinkable water at the tap is already something wonderful.
There is a shortage of labor in Poland today. Data from the Central Register of the Insured shows that as of December 2022, the number of individuals who were subject to pension and disability insurance and have non-Polish citizenship was just over one million. This is a massive increase over the past few years. Most of these individuals are Ukrainians, but there is a growing number of visitors from Nepal, Colombia, Argentina and Belarus.
Even those who have entered our country illegally are usually working. The assistance provided to such people is extremely modest, amounting to PLN 750 per month per person. In the case of a family of, say, four, the rate is even lower - it is 375 zlotys per person, or a total of 1,500 zlotys. Housing assistance for refugees is virtually non-existent; government documents proclaim that there is no coherent program in this regard. But in fact there is no program, because there is no housing. The issue is so thorny that politicians are afraid to provide any assistance to immigrants in this regard.
That's why most immigrants, from Ukraine and elsewhere, are doomed to rent apartments on the open market. I know a Ukrainian who, with his wife and four children, settled in a junkyard where he worked. I know refugees who ended up in retention centers after breaking through the fence and entanglements in the Bialowieza Forest. After a while, they had to move out of there and get a job so they could rent any kind of housing.
There are not only moral but also economic reasons in favor of civilizing the way people from the global South come to us. There is a lot of talk about the fact that the government is tightening migration policy under public pressure. Less so, however, about the fact that the labor shortage can be addressed in another way: forcing us to work until we die. By extending the retirement age.
Again, it turned out that the mechanism of issuing visas to Poland for bribes is doing well, and that even in the Philippines the same company is toiling at it as under PiS. Either way, business will find a way to bring the missing workers to Poland. It's just a matter of making the mechanism transparent and accessible enough so that pushing across the Belarusian border and through the deadly swamps of Podlasie is no longer a competitive option. Let normal employment offices be set up at consulates in the countries from where most people are trying to come to us, instead of the visa mafia that has been operating so far.
And let's be clear: either we allow labor immigration, or we agree to work a few years longer.
