The Polish government is actually making the mood against migrants. But now there are investigations into the sale of work visas by consulates – in the middle of the election campaign. Media speak of 100,000 cases.
The Polish economy has been booming for years and workers are in short supply. Business associations are therefore calling for guest workers to be allowed into the country – for agriculture or industry. Some of them declare that the entry of hundreds of thousands of people is necessary.
As skeptical as the PiS government may be about migration, it has partly given in to this pressure: the country is the EU leader in issuing work visas, the newspaper “Rzeczpospolita” recently reported, citing Brussels statistics.
Around two million people have been granted Polish visas in the last three years. According to statistics, most of these were received by Ukrainians and Belarusians, but also several 100,000 people from countries that Poland does not officially welcome.
Bribes as an accelerator
This is the context of an affair about corruption in the issuing of visas by Polish consulates. Applicants around the world are said to have expedited a Polish EU visa by paying bribes and apparently sometimes received them without the usual security checks. It has been officially confirmed that such cases occurred, but the magnitude is disputed. Media critical of the government speak of 100,000 cases.
The party leader of the right-wing national ruling party Law and Justice (PiS), Jaroslaw Kaczynski, spoke to party friends about just one “affair”: “Our investigative authorities picked up a lead last year that pointed to a crime and came across a whole complex . There were the first arrests in March, then more. The state is doing what it is supposed to do, and the whole thing is about just over 100 visas, not hundreds of thousands. And we are dealing with it the way a constitutional state deals with it. “
PiS party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski is downplaying the visa affair.
Note from the USA
However, it was only now after press inquiries that the public found out that Polish investigators have apparently been investigating such suspicions since last year. The US had apparently pointed out anomalies to the Polish media, such as a group of Indian migrants who were said to have traveled via Poland via Poland via detours to the US – equipped with Polish Schengen visas for the first part of the journey.
Service companies that took over parts of the visa procedures years ago in order to relieve the burden on the Polish consulates appear to have played a role in the possible illegal issuing of visas. According to the opposition, dozens of visas are said to have been issued in Minsk alone to people from countries from which others were trying to cross the Polish-Belarusian border almost at the same time with the help of smugglers and at risk to their lives.
Tusk: A quarter of a million questionable visas
Donald Tusk, head of the largest opposition party and Kaczynski’s challenger in next month’s elections, claimed that under PiS a quarter of a million questionable visas had been handed out to people in Africa and Asia: “From the beginning, PiS wanted to use migration for propaganda war, racist and “Foster xenophobic sentiments, but at the same time, under this guise, bring in as many people as possible and make money from it. That is the essence of the problem.”
Donald Tusk even speaks of a quarter of a million questionable visas.
Affair is not known to many people
But it is also part of the nature of the times that, according to surveys, at least the hard core of PiS supporters do not seem to cast this affair into greater doubt, even though a supposedly tough stance towards migrants has become the political brand core of the PiS party.
Although the opposition is trying with all its might to gain strength through the affair, and the choice of words is sometimes reminiscent of the anti-refugee rhetoric of the PiS, a fifth of those surveyed in a recent survey had not heard of the so-called visa affair.
Senate Chairman Grodzki, who belongs to the opposition, is using a speech on the government-affiliated national television TVP, which is his job, to draw attention to the events, since TVP viewers otherwise would not know anything about what he described as the “biggest affair of the 21st century.”