The Missing Daughters of the South Caucasus
The original publication of the project is embedded below. Underneath, find the full text.
#1. INTRODUCTION. “My parents named my sister ‘Enough’”.
GEGHARKUNIK REGION, Armenia – The trembling hands of Lena Khachatryan, an 84-years-old woman who has worked her entire life on the farm and the house, turned the pages of an old red velvet family photo album and stopped on one: “When my mother got pregnant with the third girl, they named my sister ‘Bavakan’ (‘enough’ in Armenian),” she said.
In Armenia, families used to call their daughters “Enough” when they did not want to have more girls. In 2023 there were over 1,500 women named “Enough” in Armenia (1,563, according to the voter census). Lena’s sister already passed away.
In China, another country with a strong preference for sons, some women are changing their sexist names, such as “Yanan” (meaning “second only to men”) or “Zhaodi” (“beckon to younger brother”).
“My sister, however, was not enough, and I was born,” Lena added, smiling, resting her hands on her thick brown wool sweater in the living room of her house in Tsovazard, a village at the shores of Lake Sevan. She was the fourth daughter; the long-awaited son was born after her.
When Lena married at the age of 20, she immediately went to live at her in-laws’ house, like many Armenian women do. “I had a difficult life”, she said. “There were no blankets, and we all slept in the same room: my husband and I and his parents. The cows were in the other room”. She had a miscarriage during her first pregnancy due to the hard work she did on the farm. Her mother-in-law, a very tough woman, told her that if she didn’t bring a child, she would kick her out. Finally, she had three daughters and two sons.
Son preference is an ancient form of gender discrimination. Traditionally, it manifested itself in what is known as “son-biased fertility-stopping” behaviour, that is, families had children until the number of boys they desired was born.
However, since the 1980’s, when modern access to reproductive technologies to determine the foetus’s sex was developed, an alteration of the normal ratio between male and female births began to be observed.
A pattern indicating that some families were having selective abortions of unwanted girls appeared. This practice is known as gender-biased sex selection (GBSS) – the voluntary termination of pregnancy based on the sex of the fetus; most often when it is female. It is estimated that the number of sex-selective abortions per year increased from nearly zero in the late 1970s to 1.6 million per year in 2005-2010 globally.
Sex-selective abortions have become especially visible in some parts of East Asia, South Asia and the South Caucasus, including China, India, South Korea and Vietnam, as well as three ex-soviet countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.
The tiny Principality of Liechtenstein, which is one of the most restrictive European countries on the right to abortion, has also shown a high imbalance in the sex ratio at birth.
Asia, a continent of men
The natural sex ratio at birth is around 105 boys per 100 girls. In some countries, however, many more boys are born.
Why do some parts of the world have many more boys than girls than the natural birth rate?
Erasing 140 million women from the world
The term “missing women” was coined by Indian economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, who observed that many more males than females were born in India. Some academics warned that the consequences of this imbalance in China or India could result in an upcoming “marriage squeeze” with heterosexual men who will not be able to find potential partners.
Since the 90s, some regions have seen up to 25 per cent more male births than female births, according to the UN Population Fund (UNPF). It is estimated that some 140 million women are missing in the world.
In Armenia, an estimated 1,400 girls are not born every year due to a rooted preference for male children.
Mariam could have been one of them.
#2. CONTEXT. Mariam could have been one of them
Mariam’s parents had two daughters, aged 11 and 12, when in 1991, in the midst of the energy crisis after the dissolution of the USSR, her mother became pregnant again. They were the so-called ‘dark years’ in Armenia, where a combination of war, lack of natural resources and a blockade by Azerbaijan had plunged the country into cold and hunger.
In the heart of the Gegharkunik region, a province of farmers and cattle breeders, people began to use firewood for cooking, candles for light and coats to keep warm at home. Marian’s parents then decided that if it was a boy, the mother would give birth; if it was another girl, she would have an abortion.
“You see, if it was a son, it would have been possible to continue with the pregnancy, but if it was a girl, we did not have enough bread or butter,” said Liana Asoyan, 45, the elder sister, at the nursery school that she runs next to the family home in Gavar town. Immersed in the first Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988-1994), she explained, families preferred to have male children with the idea that they would protect the country.
Thirty years have passed, and one of the women present in the conversation is the baby of that story – it was a girl. Her name is Mariam. Her mother, while pregnant with her, went to the hospital several times to confirm the fetal gender and even visited a fortune-teller, “but she still had hope that it would be a boy because people told her that the belly looked different than in previous pregnancies”, Liana said.
In the fifth month, as there was no doubt, they decided to terminate the pregnancy, but one of the sisters convinced the parents: “Would you have done the same to me because I am a girl?” And Mariam was born.
“The most important thing is that I’m here now”, laughed Mariam Asoyan, 30, dressed in black, as she breastfed her baby daughter. Her mother watered the tulips in the garden. Marian had never talked to her parents about it, “only my sisters teased me when I was a child,” she said. “We told her she is here thanks to us,” joked Liana.
The case of the Southern Caucasus
Armenia has experienced an alteration from the natural sex ratio at birth since the early 90’s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While the biologically normal ratio at birth ranges from 102 to 106 boys per 100 girls, in Armenia, ratios as high as 120 boys per 100 girls were recorded in the early 2000s, according to the National Statistical Service (NSS); they even reached 124 male per 100 females in Gegharkunik region, one of the places where more boys are born in the world.
The root causes of this phenomenon in China are a consequence of the one-child policy combined with son preference. In India, it is related to patriarchal perceptions that consider women less valuable than men, who maintain the family legacy by carrying the family name and performing funeral rites for their parents; but why in the South Caucasus?
There are similarities between the South Caucasus and some countries in Asia, Nora Dudwick, Senior Social Scientist at World Bank, explained in the report “Missing Women” in the South Caucasus (2015). “Skewed sex ratios are associated with patriarchal social structures and expectations that sons will support parents in their old age, while daughters will leave their parents at marriage to invest their labour in their husband’s family,” she said.
Gegharkunik, one of the regions where the most boys are born in the world
The news caught them by surprise in Martuni, a town of some 12,000 people, from which men spend long periods far from home working as seasonal labourers in construction in Russia and women stay at home with their parents in-laws.
“There was a research, and it turned out that in terms of sex-selective abortions, our region, Gegharkunik, was in the first place, above China,” said Anahit Gevorgyan, head of Martuni Women’s Community Council, an NGO addressing socio-economic problems through the direct involvement of their residents. With 124 boys born per 100 girls born, they had a problem.
Gevorgyan is a tall woman who has been advising the citizens of Martuni for decades. In the past, she held a high position in the administration and people used to ask her for help. That’s why in 2000, she launched this community council, “I couldn’t do everything by myself.” They started working with women, she explained, and now they work on community development.
At the council, a group of women were discussing transportation problems, cases of domestic abuse and what they call “the demographic issue”, referring to the fact that more boys are born than girls in the town. Anna Hokhikyan, a first-grade teacher with big eyes and short brunette hair, said that her students are 20 boys and five girls, and there are similar ratios in other classrooms.
“Parents of girls are happy and love them. The problem starts when society asks them: why don’t you have a boy? Who will keep the house?” Gevorgyam said.
In addition, “the decision makers are the people who have the money, and many women don’t work in this region”, said Manan Mkhitaryanm, Project Coordinator. “The corruption level is also high”, she added. “So if there is an informal payment in the hospital, it is difficult for women to make their own decisions, firstly because it is not their money, and secondly because there are some shameful things that women should not do, like refusing to pay to the relative who works in the hospital”, she said.
Between 2015 and 2017, Martuni Women’s Community Council, in partnership with the International Center for Human Development, Armavir Development Centre and Save the Children, implemented a two-year programme on combating gender-biased sex selection in Armenia, funded by the European Union. It included working with community leaders and local authorities, as well as researching, training and awareness-raising campaigns.
Among the activities, they produced several commercials for television and materials for hospitals and schools. “Let our sisters be born,” said a boy with a balloon in one of them. The aim was to get at least a 15% positive change in attitude and a 10% reduction in the number of sex-selective abortions. Gevorgyan admitted there was a positive change, but the challenge is still great.
#3. CAUSES. “In our family tree, girls are just leaves.”
When a study confirmed a trend of sex-selective abortion in Armenia, the first step was to understand why and who and when decided it.
In the leaving room of a two-story house where a family raises chickens, sheep, and cows, there was a black and white wedding portrait on a tablecloth with drawings of pomegranates that remembered the day that Gohar Grigoryan, 53, went to live at her in-laws’ home and kept silent.
Gohar, 53, was not allowed to speak directly to her father-in-law. Today she lives with two sons and their wives and her three grandchildren.
Gohar covered her mouth with one hand, in which a golden ring shined, and her eyes watered, “I lived like this for four years, quiet.” She was not allowed to speak directly to her father-in-law, she explained, so if she wanted to visit her parents, she had to ask her mother-in-law for permission, and she would ask her husband, “and sometimes he said ‘no”.
Gohar is now a mother-in-law and lives with two sons and their wives and her three grandchildren. In the kitchen, the young daughters-in-law were cooking trout and bread with cheese and tarragon. The children ran around.
Similarly, in other countries with a preference for sons, such as India, “in the absence of strong social security measures and lack of preference for old-age homes (…), the dependency on sons will continue”, explained the report ‘Patrilocality and Child Sex Ratios in India’.
Things have changed since her youth, Gohar admitted, “but families still prefer boys.” She recalled the case of a young woman from her village who had two daughters and became pregnant with a boy. It was a risky pregnancy, and the doctors said if she did not terminate it, the mother could die. “But the family did not agree because it was a boy”, Gohar said. The woman died after giving birth; the boy was born.
In the report ‘Giving women a voice’ (2014), Jilozian, director of development at the Women’s Support Center, identified three main factors why sex-selective abortions increased in Armenia after its independence in the 90’s: in a society with a strong preference for sons, she explained, more accessible technology has allowed identifying foetal sex in early stage and a drop in the birth rate since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has meant that having fewer children is less chance of having a boy.
The root of the problem, however, “is the fact that they prefer sons”, said Anna Hovhannisyan, Advocacy and Policy Development team manager at the Women’s Resource Center of Armenia. “This is why we use the term ‘son preference’ instead of ‘sex-selective abortion’ to show where the problem is coming from”, she clarified. And “the reason behind son preference is very simple: it’s patriarchy, and more specifically, gender inequality,” she explained. “In postwar and militarised societies like Armenia, there is also a prioritisation for males as future protectors of our land,” she added, “this narrative is also making inferences, but globally, the reason it’s patriarchy.”
There is a range of activities that Armenian society attributes to men, including the continuation of the family clan, the care of parents, the labour in agricultural regions and the defence of the country.
Armenia is a patrilineal society in which it is considered that only sons ensure the continuation of the family lineage.
Armenian families are also patrilocal, meaning women usually move to the house of their husband’s parents at the time of marriage. As daughters leave the house, some families prefer to have sons to have someone to take care of them when they are old. Studies suggest that populations in areas devoted to intensive agriculture have stronger patrilocal norms.
“In many Armenian houses, there is a family tree. In our tree, my branch has my name and a leaf at the end, but new branches sprouted from my brother’s branch,” said Arevik, 27, a mother of two-year-old twin daughters. Armenians consider that only sons ensure the continuation of their family lineage.
On a spring afternoon, Arevik, 27, in jeans and sneakers, walked her two-year-old twin daughters, Sofi and Lia, in a stroller across a park on the outskirts of Yerevan. Older people on benches rested in the shade, children rode bikes, and a seamstress sewed in a booth. A man lighted a cigarette and asked, gazing over the stroller:
–Are they boys or girls?
–Girls –Arevik replied.
–Don’t worry, the important thing is that they are healthy.
“Suddenly, everyone decided that I should be worried because both are girls,” lamented Arevik, who said that this kind of situation happens “several times, every single day, with strangers.”
“I feel a lot of pressure because I know my husband’s family expects me to have a boy. For Armenian society, girls are not enough”, continued Arevik. She explained that the doctors informed her about the sex of the twins in the fifth month of pregnancy, “and a relative suggested that they had told her so late so I wouldn’t have an abortion.”
“When you have a boyfriend, they pressure you until you marry. When you marry, they pressure you until you have children. When you have children, they pressure you until you have a boy”, she added.
“Even before abortions, there are all kinds of rituals and people making money for families to have sons,” said Sevan Petrosyan, who managed ‘Caring for Equality’ (2015-2019), a four-year project on sex-selection at World Vision Armenia. “Magic, charms and fortune-telling were utilised not only to predict the sex of the expected child, but also to ‘order’ boys,” explained researcher Tsaturyan Ruzanna in the report ‘How to have a boy’.
#4. THE DECISION MAKERS. Silent violence.
Tatevik Aghabekyan, president of the Sexual Assault Crisis Center in Yerevan
On a Sunday at noon in a room full of toys in northern Yerevan, Tatevik Aghabekyan, president of the Sexual Assault Crisis Center, played with her three daughters, Marie, 11, Nare, 7 and Sona, 1 and her dog, Mimi.
“To be honest, as we knew I was pregnant, I dreamt of having a daughter because in a patriarchal system, if the boy is the eldest, stereotypes are more present”, she said.
Then, a second child was born, a girl. And a third one, who was a girl too.
“You need the fourth one”, her husband’s family started to insinuate. “But just that, because I’m a very strong woman. Maybe in another situation, they would push more,” she added.
The missing girls after the third child
In Armenia, the imbalance between born boys and girls is especially alarming after the third child. Although it has decreased in recent years, from 183 boys per 100 girls for the third child in 2005 to 121 boys per 100 girls in 2021, according to UNFPA, it’s still a worrying number.
Who decides?
“My grandmother pressured my parents to give me to my uncle because I had an elder sister and I was also a girl, and he did not have children”, said Lilit*, 47. The negotiation lasted three months. In the end, the maternal grandmother took her to Georgia with her, “and I spent my first seven years just talking by phone with my parents from the post office. I remember I cried after every call, and my grandma bought me an ice cream.”
Tatevik Aghabekyan explained that in the years she spent working for women’s rights, she saw a lot of cases in which the families pushed wives or daughters-in-law to have an abortion only because the child would be a girl.
“There was a woman who had one daughter, and the family said she should become pregnant again”, she recalled, but she got pregnant with another girl, and they pushed her to have an abortion. After that, Tatevik said, she had a lot of health issues, but a time later, the family pushed her to get pregnant again, and it was again a girl. “So she got divorced, and the girl was born,” she added. “She was strong enough to leave the family, others don’t realise this is violence.”
“It is about education and some cultural changes,” said Mane Minasyan, PR and Communication Coordinator of World Vision Armenia and mother of a daughter, who explained that for many women in communities, home is an oppressive space “in which mothers-in-law and husbands are the decision makers”.
Between 2017 and 2019, UNESCO, and the Swiss universities of Bern and Lausanne and Brown University (US), worked on a study on ‘The Structure of Son Bias in Armenia’. They found that Armenians prefer mixed-gender families. However, when they only have daughters, they actively seek to manipulate the probability of having a son; when they only have sons, it is not a big deal. The survey also found that “husbands tend to be much more son-biassed than wives,” said Astghik Martirosyan, Child Rights Monitoring Specialist at UNICEF, “so pressure is coming from men.”
Martirosyan explained that this was an unexpected finding since there was a tendency to blame only the mothers-in-law “because they are the ones who go to the hospital with their daughter-in-law for abortion and a key player and quite visible,” however “men are the driving force of son preference because they have the authority in the family, even if it comes out of the mother-in-law’s mouth.” This is why “all awareness-raising efforts are ignoring this significant factor: men and children,” she added.
#5 RESPONSES. Is the actual problem being tackled?
In the examination room of a clinic in Achajur, a town of 4,000 people in the northeast of Armenia near the border with Azerbaijan, a gynaecologist was performing an ultrasound on a patient. Cows and horses grazed on these paths, along which once passed the caravans that traded between Syria and the North Caucasus. Their residents work the fields.
“In this area, women don’t visit doctors frequently,” said doctor Koryun Rubeni, dressed in a white coat, with a stethoscope around his neck. “But there was a trend for improvement,” he added. In the corridor, a couple, two women in their thirties and a girl, coughing, next to her grandmother, waited for their turn. The doctor sees between 35 and 40 patients daily.
In rural areas, the number of families that prefer a son than a daughter is higher (16.1% vs. 5.2% per cent) than in cities (11.2% vs. 5.2%). “When they tell me, doctor, let’s do an abortion, I immediately put them to listen to sonography of the baby’s heart rate. And, most of them change their mind,” said the doctor.
But does restricting abortion solve the problem of son preference?
Legislation, a risky path
Like in other ex-Soviet republics, in Armenia, abortion has been the main tool for family planning due to its availability and little cost compared with other types of contraceptives, explained the report ‘Giving Women a Voice’.
In 1920, under Soviet rule, induced abortion was legalised in Armenia. Soviet Russia (1917-1922), which would become the Soviet Union in 1922, was the first place in the world to legalise abortion. It banned it in 1936 and reinstated it in 1955 after an increase in mortality of women due to illegal abortions.
In 2022, abortion was still the primary method of family planning in Armenia. Half of the respondents of a study by the Advanced Public Research Group NGO had never used modern contraceptives. They are more expensive, sometimes not available, or even viewed with suspicion. “In the village pharmacy, we saw that they wrote down the names of those who bought condoms and how many,” Tatevik Aghabekyan said.
A three-day waiting period
Intending to reduce selective abortions, in 2014, the Armenian Government adopted the first decree on the need to adopt some measures. In June 2016, the Armenian Parliament adopted a legislative amendment to the Law on “Reproductive Health and Rights to Reproduction”, allowing abortion until 12 weeks and restricting it after that, except for medical or social reasons. In addition, a three-day waiting period for women seeking an abortion was added.
“When research showed our number of sex-selective abortions, everyone panicked and started to think what to do,” remembered Tatevik Aghabekyan. Then, she said, the government and some international organisations started to speak about improving gender inequality, “but we realised that soon they were not talking about equality but limiting the right of abortions. And this is a dangerous path”, she said
“If I lived in a village, very far from Yerevan, and I didn’t have enough money to go twice during these three days of waiting,” Aghabekyan said, “I would find someone in my village who might be doing something that puts my life at risk” (such as a clandestine abortion).
Some women’s rights associations and activists fear that the problem of son preference in Armenia will be used to restrict the right to abortion instead of focusing on improving gender equality, as it was used in campaigns in the United Kingdom or the United States. “You cannot solve a women’s rights issue by sacrificing a bigger women’s rights issue”, said Astghik Martirosyan.
“Actually, this problem is not that much related to abortion,” said Zaruhi Tonoyan, GBSS Programme Coordinator on UNFPA in Armenia. “Abortion is only the means; the root causes are even deeper. We’re talking about the role of women and girls in society,” she added. Tonoyan also highlighted “the importance of men’s engagement in addressing the problem”.
Tatevik believes that what nobody is adding to the debate is that forcing a woman to have an abortion because of the fetal sex or coercing her into having more children until a boy is born is a form of violence, not reproductive health, and it is necessary to drive it from that point.
In 2016, World Vision collected data on gender equality and parenting from 2053 married adults and 637 unmarried youth, finding that 94% of participants believe “a man should have the final word about decisions in the home”. The survey also showed relatively high levels of accepted violence: 66% of men and 63% of women reported that “if a woman betrays her husband, he can hit her”.
Rising awareness. How television and schools can challenge social norms
Astghik Martirosyan believes that “interventions across the life cycle of the problem” are needed in Armenia.
The History book project
“Do you know how many women are represented in History textbooks in Armenia?” asked Martirosyan; “less than five per cent are women,” she said, quoting a study by the World Bank.
In 2020, UNICEF launched a resource box of History for high school students, aiming to help Armenian teachers adopt gender-sensitive practices. They provided 240 cards to schools free of charge on topics such as ritual weddings or women’s social activities.
Female and male roles in television
UNICEF and the Public Television Channel of Armenia also took the message to the prime time by co-producing a 16-part TV series that was broadcast in 2021, targeting people of childbearing age and showing women empowerment models, such as a single mother who was a minister or man with several daughters advocating for girls’ rights. “But a TV series alone is not going to solve all the problems”, said Zara Sargsyan, Communication Specialist at UNICEF, “and these kinds of interventions are very expensive”.
Other local and international organisations’ activities included television campaigns and doctors’ training.All the people interviewed for this article, on the streets and in Armenian towns, had heard about the issue of sex-selective abortions.
#6 RESULTS. A better trend and a worrying figure.
Several years have passed since a study warned that more boys than girls were born in Armenia. Families like Mary Sargsyan’s have grown in Gegharkunik, the region infamous for having exceeded China’s male birth ratio. She is now the aunt of three girls, Lilith, 8 and Susanna, 10, who like drawing hearts and dogs, and a 9-month-old baby. “My brother wants to have many children, three girls, and after that, having boys, but if the fourth is a girl again, it is not a problem”, she added. Mary would also like to have five children.
The sex ratio at birth in Armenia dropped from 114 boys per 100 girls in early 2010 to 112 boys per 100 girls in 2016 “as a result of wide-scale work conducted by the Government jointly with development partners, including international and local organisations”, welcomed UNFPA in a 2018 report.
On Northern Avenue, a lively commercial street in Yerevan of vendors of pomegranate juice, pedestrians with shopping bags and stray dogs, we asked passers-by about the
preference for boys and the changes in recent years.
Lucy, 47, walking with her mother, said: “The male gender is considered an heir, the one who continues the gene.” “But I see around me that the mentality has changed,” she added.
Mikael, 55, father of three, two girls and a boy, explained that they didn’t think about it until his second daughter was born. “Then, we thought that we should have a boy.” “We Armenians want to have boys so the nation can continue,” he said.
In the first semester of 2022, the ratio at birth in Armenia was 111 boys per 100 girls, showing “a trend that is clearly improving, but it is still not the norm,” said Martirosyan.
However, the latest UNFPA also showed a worrying figure – the ratio at birth is three points higher than the previous year (108 in 2021), which some experts see as a consequence of the 44-day war in 2020. At least 3,809 Armenians were killed. “Some health workers told us that families chose a boy, because they lost their soldiers,” Tonoyan said.
In addition, “if you look at the numbers for the third, fourth, fifth child and more, the sex selection is happening later,” said Astghik Martirosyan, “so there are families who instead of aborting are having more children to have a boy” “But if we look at the problem, which is not the sex selection, but the son preference, that problem wasn’t solved,” she concluded.
Arevik, the young mother of twin girls, showed us her family tree on her phone. The name of her daughters did not appear because they are female. Instead, in her branch, there was a leaf.
Drawings by Lia, Sofi, Lilith and Susana
Migrants From “Culturally Distant Countries” Are Already Here, in Their Hundreds of Thousands. They Were Invited by the PiS Government
For conservative parties, the signals coming from Brussels are worrying. The EU Council has agreed to relocate refugees — or, alternatively, to charge Member States for refusing to take them in.
There’s a long way to go before the new rules come into force, and the potential payments are actually very small, but conservative politicians and commentators are sounding the alarm.
“This is a mockery of Poland, it’s discrimination, it’s extremely brazen!” Jarosław Kaczyński shouts in the Sejm (the lower house of the Polish parliament, Translator’s note).
“That’s why we will not agree to it. And the Polish nation doesn’t agree either. This issue will have to be put to a referendum,” the leader of the Law and Justice party (PiS) declares, trying to reverse his party’s poor start to the election campaign.
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki thunders: “The PiS government is the guardian of the security and cultural cohesion of our nation and state.”
MEP Witold Waszczykowski wrings his hands: “This is a recipe for the complete disintegration of our states by huge groups of emigrants.”
Editor Michał Karnowski worries: “Let’s not forget that there is an ideological goal behind this: migrants from culturally distant countries are ‘more valuable’ because they are supposed to ‘enrich’ us culturally, change our customs, social life, and the role of Christianity in public life. This is how it has been done in many Western countries; these are the goals they have set for themselves in this round.”
Too late.
Migrants from “culturally distant countries” are already here, in their hundreds of thousands. They were invited by the PiS government.
A fairytale Europe
In 2015, the last year of the Civic Platform government, officials issued 65,000 work permits to non-EU foreigners (EU citizens do not need such permits). In 2021, 504,000 such permits were issued. The following year: 365,000. These are not figures pulled from a left-wing institute, but official data from the Ministry of Family and Social Policy.
Under PiS rule, Poland has become a leader in terms of openness to non–European migrants. No other EU country receives as many foreign workers.
Those who assume that most of them are our Ukrainian brothers are wrong.
In 2022, the government issued 85,000 work permits to Ukrainians, less than a quarter of the total. The rest of the workers came from such “culturally close” countries as Uzbekistan (33,000 permits), Turkey (25,000), India (41,000), the Philippines (22,000) or Bangladesh (13,000).
2021 was a record year even before Putin’s attack on Ukraine. The number of permits issued was already hovering around 400,000 decisions per year. Covid did not stop this — on the contrary. Poland was one of the few countries that did not close its borders during the pandemic, for example to Filipinos.
An important and sometimes illegal business has developed around the employment of workers from far-away countries.
It begins like the case of Antonio and Miguel, two friends from a fishing village in Mexico. Working in construction, at the market, or as fishermen, they barely earned enough to meet their basic needs until an elegant, middle-aged man arrived in their village.
The recruiter spun fairytale visions of work in Europe. Antonio and Miguel had to pay three thousand dollars within a few days. The man arranged visas, plane tickets, accommodation and a job in Poland. They ended up in a small house near Jarocin.
Two bathrooms and a kitchen for 22 people. Bunk beds, seven to a room. They worked 8, 10 and sometimes 12 hours a day, carrying heavy crates of cattle carcasses. Miguel developed a hernia, but his supervisor at the employment agency shouted that the company would deduct 150 zloty from his wages for every day he missed work.
I described the story of Antonio, Miguel, and other migrants from South America in a report for the daily Duży Format Gazeta Wyborcza.
Orlen will also benefit
Local recruiters in Asia and South America work with employment agencies in Poland to find cheap labour. They promise to do all the paperwork, but charge a hefty fee. Three thousand dollars actually sounds reasonable, considering I’ve heard of Filipinos paying five thousand dollars. Those eager to travel often borrow from family or take money from non-bank financial institutions.
“A recruiter told me ‘Just smile’!” Marlon from the Philippines told me. “I was surprised because the embassy officials didn’t ask any questions. They just asked me to sign the documents and told me to pick up my visa in two weeks.”
Workers from Asia and South America often end up in slaughterhouses, cold stores, poultry factories, logistics warehouses or production lines. Companies hire these workers and the agency takes care of everything: accommodation, transport to the factory, wages, insurance.
Thousands of them live in rented houses, barracks and containers scattered in towns and villages across Poland. The only time locals see them is at dawn, when they pass through the factory gates, or in the evening, when they go shopping at Lidl.
Agencies employing Filipinos charge between 33 and 37 zloty per hour of migrant labour. Of this, a maximum of 20 zloty goes to the worker; the company keeps the rest.
Migrants earn the minimum hourly wage, and sometimes less, as their bosses can be very creative. Workers have deductions from their wages for accommodation, even if it’s an unheated container, for work clothes, for transport to the factory, for obtaining work permits… Instead of the promised $1,500 a month, Miguel and Antonio earned 1,300 zlotys, well below the national minimum wage.
The Polish state is actively supporting this new industry by issuing permits and visas en masse. And the government itself benefits from the cheap labour.
A few weeks ago, I visited the construction site of Polimery Police — a huge factory being built by the Grupa Azoty, one of the state’s giants. Almost all the workers there were from the Philippines and India. They worked 13-hour days with no right to rest or paid sick leave. Most of them were later to be transferred to the construction of the Orlen refinery near Plock.
The unluckiest minister in history
Now the key question: why is the government kicking out refugees with one hand and opening the door to hundreds of thousands of migrants with the other?
For the sake of this text, let’s imagine that we are discussing this with a right-wing commentator who explains that refugees — like those on the border with Belarus — are trying to enter Poland illegally, and that they are doing so at the instigation of a hostile regime. We can’t monitor them; we don’t know if they pose a threat.
On the other hand, workers who come to work enter Poland legally, at our invitation.
Let’s leave aside the discussion regarding the “legality” of the refugees who have been denied the right to asylum by the Polish government. OKO.Press readers are well aware of the situation on the border with Belarus, as my colleagues have written about it several times.
Let’s take the point of view of a right-winger for a moment and ask: is “legality” and control of migrants really a core value of this government? I’m not convinced.
Everything seems to point to diplomatic missions issuing visas “automatically.”
I’ve heard many stories like Marlon’s. Filipinos and workers of other nationalities answer a few general questions at the embassy, or none at all, or don’t even visit the embassy because recruiters submit documents on their behalf.
“Well, at least we have them under control in Poland,” our commentator will say. This is only partly true. The Polish state, in the form of provincial offices, issues residence cards that have to be renewed periodically. In this way, officials have some control over people who want to stay in Poland legally. On the other hand, we don’t even know how many of these people live in our country.
While working on one of my articles, I tried to find out how many Guatemalans work in Poland. For a month I went back and forth between the Office for Foreigners and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I never got an answer.
If I had looked at the data from the Ministry of Family Affairs, I would have learned that in 2022, 347 work permits were issued to Guatemalans. Does this mean that there are 347 Guatemalans in Poland? Not necessarily, because this number only includes new and renewed permits issued that year. And if someone has a three-year permit, for example, they won’t appear in this statistic. It also doesn’t include migrants who came on tourist visas or those who came from other Schengen countries.
As I mentioned earlier, according to the ministry, 504,000 foreigners received work permits in 2021. However, Eurostat reports that Poland issued 790,000 such permits. Why is there a discrepancy? Because Eurostat uses data from the Office for Foreigners. So two different government institutions count the number of migrants working in Poland differently.
Incidentally, even if we accept that this lower figure is true, Poland is still the clear leader in the EU in terms of foreigners admitted. Spain, in second place, issued only 88,000 work permits. And we’re talking about 2021, before the war broke out.
What’s more, the PiS party is not concerned with the “legality” of migrants. The signal sent to voters is different: we will not accept foreigners from other cultures. No one, whether legal or illegal.
In 2018, Paweł Chorąży, the deputy minister for investment and development, lost his job after publicly stating that “the influx of immigrants to our country must increase in order to maintain economic growth.”
He added that Poland should accept immigrants because it is thanks to them that “prosperity is built in countries that have achieved success.” Mateusz Morawiecki rebuked his subordinate, saying that the deputy minister had “definitely got ahead of himself in some of his statements.”
Chorąży is probably the unluckiest minister in history. He was sacked for telling the truth, which was in line with his government’s policy.
Will they work and then go back?
Is it simply a matter of “cultural differences?” Our right-wing commentator could explain to us that “different cultural backgrounds simply mean Muslims; but Catholics, even from the other side of the world, are welcome here.”
It’s an interesting thesis — but completely wrong.
In 2020, Janusz Kowalski, then a member of the Solidarna Polska party, argued that Rafał Trzaskowski, then a presidential candidate, “would accept any number of culturally alien Muslim immigrants at the snap of Berlin’s fingers.”
Mr. Deputy! Don’t be so afraid of Trzaskowski. The government, of which you are a member, has managed this task perfectly on its own.
After all, Turkey (remember: 25,000 permits per year), Uzbekistan (33,000) or Bangladesh (13,000) are predominantly Muslim countries.
In 2022 — as Platforma MEP Elżbieta Łukacijewska pointed out — the PiS government accepted a total of 136,000 migrants from countries where Islam is the dominant religion.
Just so you know, the PiS won the 2015 elections on the basis of its firm opposition to accepting 7,000 Muslim refugees in Poland.
Seven thousand.
True, a certain employment agency specialising in bringing in Filipinos argues that they will make good workers because they are culturally close to us — after all, Catholicism is the dominant religion in the Philippines.
This may be an argument for some employers, but I doubt it. “Cultural similarity” does not play a role in bringing in cheap labour, because the only important factor is the “cheapness” of that labour. Besides, embassy and consulate officials issuing visas do not ask anyone whether they are really Catholic.
“But wait!” — our right-wing commentator might exclaim. “Refugees from the Belarusian border will be lured to Europe to sit on welfare and change the culture of the entire continent. Meanwhile, economic migrants will work for a while until their contracts expire and then politely return home.”
Oh, the naivety!
Perhaps some foreigners will work for a few years and return home, but many, perhaps the majority, will stay.
Like Marlon from the mountain town in the Philippines, who started his adventure in Poland by running around a drugstore warehouse for 12 hours a day. Today he has an office job and an idea for his own business. He sees Poland, with its fast-growing economy, as a land of opportunity.
Like Joan from Manila, who came to Poland to assemble windows in a factory in the Podlasie region and now works as a childminder in Warsaw. Her daughter, Dorothy, has already moved to Poland. She is studying at a private university and says it is her destiny to stay here.
Like Lucia from Guatemala, who was verbally abused by the slaughterhouse manager — he shouted “Fuck, damn it” and threw pieces of meat at her. She had to grit her teeth and go back to work, praying to God to give her the strength to carry on. She would like to see her daughter again, but so far there’s no chance. Lucia’s trip to Poland left her with a huge debt, and she can’t return home until she earns enough money to pay it off.
“Poland reminds me of Switzerland 50 years ago. We also thought migrants would come for a while, work and go home. But they stayed forever,” a Swiss journalist working in Poland told me.
Half a century ago, Germany also believed that Turkish guest workers (or Gastarbeiter) would be brought in to work in its factories and plants for just a few years. Today, three million people of Turkish origin live in Germany, and Turks are the country’s largest minority.
We could ask the Dutch, the Belgians, the French or the British about the migrants — will they stay or will they return to their home countries?
“We called for workers and they came,” said the Swiss writer Max Frisch.
So no, dear right-wing commentator, migrants are not going anywhere. They are already here. And they are here to stay.
Better than Ukrainians?
Could it be — and I shudder at such a disgusting thought — that all this anti-refugee rhetoric is just a big show for the elections? And that maybe it will end just when it’s time to talk about money?
And here we are. The answer to why the right-wing government is actively encouraging migration to Poland is clear.
Prime Minister Morawiecki can tell stories about how Poland is catching up with the most developed economies on the continent and “is no longer a reservoir of cheap labour”, but the truth is quite different.
In terms of average labour costs per hour, Poland ranks fifth from the bottom in the EU. It’s even more “cheerful” when it comes to economic innovation — we’re fourth from the bottom.
Meanwhile, one of the engines of the Polish economy is the furniture industry, which reached a value of 56 billion zlotys in 2021 — 20 per cent more than in the previous year. Incidentally, there was the case of a group of Filipinas working in a furniture factory near Wrocław, where the boss took away their passports so they couldn’t look for another job and forced them to work beyond their physical limits. It was only after the intervention of the La Strada Foundation that the women received support.
We are also a leader in road transport. A fifth of all goods transported on European roads are now carried by Polish companies. Strangely enough, this industry also often employs workers from other countries. Exploitation is rampant, as the example of Filipino drivers in a report by TVN’s Superwizjer shows.
The meat industry, worth 72 billion zlotys, is also doing well. This is where Miguel and Antonio from Mexico and Lucia from Guatemala worked.
Migrants are also exploited by international companies as couriers and delivery staff for Uber, Glovo and Stuart. If you are interested in this issue, you can read more about it in my book, where I describe what exploitation in this industry looks like in practice.
What do all these industries have in common? They depend on low labour costs. And they are dominated by foreigners.
There’s nothing wrong with inviting migrants in — as long as we don’t invite them in to exploit them.
Meanwhile, workers from Asia and South America are doing the worst jobs in our country that nobody else wants to do.
“I used to see a lot of Poles and a few Ukrainians, then a few Poles and a lot of Ukrainians. And now, I’m telling you, there are fewer Ukrainians too. They don’t want to work for those wages anymore. More people are coming from Georgia or South America,” I was told by Olena, who works in a meat factory near Jarocin.
Employment agencies offering Filipinos to Polish companies advertise the “goods” with phrases like, “they don’t make such high demands as Ukrainians.”
“Advantages: low demands.”
“Very low turnover, high loyalty.”
“They have a positive effect on the efficiency of other foreigners, including Ukrainians.”
Here’s my thesis: even before the war, Ukrainian workers didn’t want to do the worst jobs for the lowest wages. Because they learned the language quickly, it was easy for them to find new jobs. Polish bosses had a choice: they could either raise wages or look for cheaper and more submissive labour. They chose the latter. Filipinos or Guatemalans who don’t speak the language and who have indebted themselves and their families to come to Poland will not be too “demanding.”
In 2019, Dr Maciej Grodzicki from the Institute of Economics, Finance and Management at the Jagiellonian University told Gazeta.pl: “Everyone keeps saying: ‘Yes, we’re threatened by the middle-income trap, we need to modernise the economy.’ Business organisations keep hosting conferences on the subject. And then the same business organisations appeal to the ruling party to facilitate the influx of immigrants from Bangladesh and East Asia because there is a shortage of workers. And they devote their lobbying efforts to this.”
“Is that bad?” asks the commentator, to which the expert replies:
“It’s bad because it only perpetuates the labour-intensive and outdated way of production in Poland. I’m in favour of opening the borders to migrants. But the government should set a condition for companies: we will let migrants in if you invest in efficient and well-paid jobs.”
Four years and millions of work permits later, it’s clear that the PiS didn’t follow the doctor’s advice.
A strange contradiction
This strange contradiction, with the government importing migrants on the one hand and pretending they aren’t here on the other, is already causing problems. And it will cause even bigger problems in the future.
Poland does not have a migration policy.
The government has no plan to help or integrate migrants. There are no institutions to which they can turn to for help, apart from the overstretched NGOs.
Migrants have no access to free Polish language courses or legal advice. Once in Poland, they are at the mercy of their employers. Exploitation is easy in such a context.
There is no register of unscrupulous employment agencies. Labour inspectors, drastically underfunded and powerless, are supposed to help migrants whose rights are violated.
In extreme cases, victims of fraud can turn to border guards, who can grant them the status of human trafficking victims, allowing them to stay in Poland legally. This is what happened to Lucia, Miguel, Antonio and over thirty other Latin American workers. Thanks to their testimony, the prosecutor’s office and the Border Guard are investigating an employment agency in Zielona Góra. They may be charged with human trafficking, but I wouldn’t bet on it. The definition of trafficking in the penal code is very complex, which makes it difficult to prove in court. Judges often resort to charges related to labour law violations, which result in much lighter sentences for the perpetrators.
Ironically, the PiS party doesn’t boast about its pro-migration policies. So there’s no chance of solving these problems in this government.
And what about the prospect of solving them after the elections and a possible victory of the opposition? I doubt it too, for one simple reason: helping migrants would mean clashing with companies that exploit their difficult situation. It would mean strengthening labour inspectorates and restricting the junk contracts that allow Filipino, Guatemalan and other workers to work up to 300 hours a month without holidays or sick leave. As it happens, labour rights are the same for workers from Poland and elsewhere, so the mechanisms for violating them are the same. It seems unlikely that Civic Platform (PO) politicians would suddenly want to fight against labour market anomalies.
Liberal voters may not want to either. It’s easier to sympathise with refugees camping in the woods near Hajnówka than to notice containers set up on muddy fields outside a chicken factory, or to care about the fate of a Glovo delivery man who has just brought our dinner.
Business owners and liberal commentators can fall back on tired arguments to justify the exploitation of migrants. For example, “if they didn’t like it, they wouldn’t work, nobody forced them to come”. As if someone who doesn’t have enough money to feed their children really has a choice. You can close your eyes to avoid seeing a simple fact: even if it is legal to ask a worker to run around a factory for 13 hours a day for the minimum hourly wage, it is still immoral.
Perhaps no one really wants to know about the migrants holed up in factories and warehouses across the country. Because their presence says unpleasant things about us — for example, that although we never had overseas colonies, we are now happy to benefit from the post-colonial order.
We have gone from being a country that people flee to a country that people come to — from all over the world, not just from nearby countries. We have gone from being the exploited to being the exploiter.
We have to face the fact that our economic success is not based on the hard work and ingenuity of local entrepreneurs. It’s based on exploitation, an area in which we have centuries of rich experience.
Instead of ridiculing Western multiculturalism, we need to admit that we are at the forefront of it.
This time we hear from editor Jacek Karnowski: “We hear that we have to take in 2,000 refugees or pay a fine of 40 million euros. Today that’s not a problem — we’ll pay if we have to. But it’s clear that this is meant to set a precedent. Once this mechanism is introduced, it will be applied endlessly and before we know it, our cities will resemble Paris or Brussels in terms of ethnic diversity. We’ll be faced with the problem of ghettos, no-go zones, crime and a thousand other problems”.
Dear Editor, why all the fuss? It’s the government that you so actively support that brings hundreds of thousands of migrants to the Vistula every year, and yet no ghettos or “no-go” zones have been reported in Poland. But you are right — Polish cities will resemble the West in terms of ethnicity. In fact, they’re already beginning to do so.
Writing in Krytyka Polityczna, columnist Jakub Majmurek argues that it’s the PiS party that has laid the foundations for a multi-ethnic and multicultural Poland. It’s hard to disagree. The conservatives may claim that “they won’t make the mistakes of the West”, but all the evidence suggests that they are the ones orchestrating the biggest multicultural operation in contemporary Europe. And by failing to help or integrate refugees in any way, they are also repeating the worst mistakes of Western Europe.
In 30 years’ time, will we see the emergence of Latin American, Filipino or Turkish neighbourhoods in Poland, where the Polish language will be a rarity and social and economic exclusion an everyday reality? It would be an extraordinary irony if the seeds of the worst right-wing nightmare were sown by none other than a right-wing government.
Editor: Bartosz Kocejko