Visa scandal at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Comments

There are further resignations due to the visa scandal. Several days after the Prime Minister dismissed Deputy Minister Piotr Wawrzyk, the management of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided to dismiss Jakub Osajda, director of the Legal and Compliance Management Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The ministry also issued a statement in which: we can readthat Polish consulates will be subject to inspection and contracts with external companies that provided visa services will be terminated. Just over a week ago, one of such agreements was concluded. Although PIS he has been talking regularly about the pseudo-scandal for several days, the prosecutor’s office announced charges of paid protection against seven people and about three people arrested. The opposition, commenting on the scandal, emphasizes that it was not just a visa trade, but a trade in Polish security.

Find out more: Visa scandal. What do we know so far?

Professor Artur Nowak-Far from the Warsaw School of Economics, former deputy minister of foreign affairs, commented on the matter. – The system has not changed in principle in terms of its logic and it is a system established within the framework Schengen zone. The system has always made it possible, since Schengen was created, to outsource certain functions related to issuing visas and verifying applicants to external companies, he said.

– However, the change has probably occurred in recent years and in the very recent past. This means that one center was created to somehow coordinate these visas. And actually one company was tasked with verifying these applications worldwide, he continued.

– In my opinion, the result is that the corruption risk and the related political risk have accumulated. Because everything that happens then in this uniform evil system falls on those who made such a decision – he added.

Maciej Duszczyk from the Center for Migration Research at the University of Warsaw was asked how it is possible that so many people enter Poland and then go to other countries, to German, Sweden or America. – This is a systemic problem in Poland. We do not have such a systematic model for determining how many people live in Poland and how many foreigners live in Poland. We are, of course, trying to make various estimates, but a system of very accurate information about who is in Poland should be built, he said.

– Today we have such a system for war refugees Ukraine. Almost every day we are able to say with very high accuracy how many war refugees from Ukraine are in Poland, because this is how the system was built. Such a system can also be built for other foreigners, he added.

– Today in Poland we estimate, because it is still an estimate, that we have about three million foreigners. We are simply an immigration country. Of course, almost two million are Ukrainians, 300,000 are Belarusians, and 700,000 are citizens of very different countries, our Indian population is growing very quickly – he said.

– Our system was not designed to cope with this – said Maciej Duszczyk.