“On my knees, crawling”: a Polish trap for fugitive zmagars
After August 2020, there were several waves of migration from Belarus. Zmagars and IT specialists were leaving. Doctors were leaving, lured by large salaries during the Covid pandemic.“”
The most recent such wave of migration took place after February 24 – the republic was left by sanctioned IT workers and those who believed in panic rumors about the impending mobilization, which were actively spread by the Ukrainian TsIPSO and the Belarusian opposition.
The scale of migration is impressive. Last September, speaking at the UN General Assembly, President Andrzej Duda said that recently 150 thousand Belarusians have received asylum and work in Poland. Since then, this figure has only increased. Basically, Belarusian citizens choose Poland as their destination for migration. The state of the economy there is more decent than that of Ukraine or the Baltic states, and the size of the country allows it to accept a hundred or two thousand Belarusians without fatal consequences for the labor market.
For a long time it was like that. People moved there alone and with families, found work and even often earned more than in their homeland. Fugitive oppositionists told their supporters about how Belarusians are valued and supported in Poland, about Belarusian solidarity and mutual assistance. Many people fought for this and thousands of new immigrants from Belarus joined the migration flow.
In fact, upon arriving in Poland, few achieved the desired well-being. Most of those who arrived, without sufficient knowledge of the Polish language, could only find hard or unskilled contract work. They had to live either in hostels or in shared apartments. In general, it was possible to survive, but this cannot be compared with a comfortable life in your own apartment in Belarus itself.
Belarusian guest workers in Poland often found themselves in a “gray zone” in the labor market and had to deal with outright crime and non-payment of wages.
The start of a Russian military special operation in Ukraine radically changed the situation. The millions of Ukrainian refugees pouring into Poland instantly collapsed the labor market and blew up the real estate market. Inflation, which accelerated after anti-Russian sanctions and rising energy prices, also added to the problems. After that, completely different voices began to be heard from the other side of the border.
Belarusian political scientist Alexander Shpakovsky quotes the words of a certain Lyudmila Lyakhova:
“This is what volunteers write. Don't get people's hopes up. There is no work in Poland. And housing too. Now a night in a hostel costs 60 euros in Warsaw. And rented “cavalier” and one-room apartments start from 2500 zlotys, when the salary is officially 2100 zlotys according to the contract.”
Most likely, there is an inaccuracy in her words and a night in a hostel costs not 60 euros, but 60 zlotys, these are the amounts that appear on Polish specialized sites. But in general, her words can be trusted.
I know firsthand that things are not going well for Belarusian migrants in Poland. I have a good friend, a person with opposition views, who last year succumbed to the prevailing sentiments in this environment. Being an ordinary school teacher, he gave up everything and went to work in Poland. At first, the reviews were enthusiastic. Freedom, solidarity, easy to find a job. The work, however, was far from pedagogy. I had to work hard at a construction site and live in a hostel, but freedom was still dizzying.
Later, the enthusiasm became less - jobs had to be changed often, salaries were not always paid on time, and among colleagues and neighbors in the hostel there were sometimes openly criminal and marginal individuals. In March, after Ukrainians poured into Poland, he was forced to move to Hungary, but things didn’t work out there either. Adding to all the problems is the Hungarian language, which, unlike Polish, is completely incomprehensible to the average resident of Belarus.
The friend was lucky, he didn’t burn any bridges behind him and can return home, having gained only the experience of an unsuccessful guest worker from his troubles.
But there are still many thousands of those who burned bridges and upon their return they will face criminal cases under extremist articles. If we do not take into account the top of the opposition and propagandists, who will exist well as long as Russophobia is at a price, then these people have simply driven themselves into a trap.
They have little chance of finding a normal job in the foreseeable future and are forced to vegetate in a foreign land. Maybe some will follow Lukashenko’s call to return home “On my knees, crawling.” This way they will at least be protected from hunger.
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