37020 British expats in Poland

The Telegraph's map says there are nearly forty thousand British expats in Poland.
I find this figure astounding.

I would have thought it is nearer four thousand.

Comments?
map here, click on Poland to see the number:

telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/11287523/Where-are-the-British-expats-in-Europe-This-map-will-tell-you.html

It does seem rather high.
I wouldn't have thought there were anywhere near that many.
This Guardian article is from 2012 so obviously not current, but there is a huge difference between 764 officially registered UK inhabitants then, and 37,020 in 2014.

theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/jan/26/europe-population-who-lives-where

Is it possible that many Poles who have had children in the UK have registered them for a UK passport and citizenship? and then on return to Poland these children would be skewing the figures somewhat? Just a thought....don't know the workings of it, but data gathering is rather literal and would not (probably would not be allowed under some obscure EU directive to) differentiate between these children and people like myself who is an Englishman who has settled in Poland with his Polish wife.

This would certainly seem so.

Many times I've seen Polish parents going thru emigration control with their children and their children having Irish/UK passports while the parents use a Polish passport or their Polish ID card.

Nice to see though that The Telegraph doesn't know the proper definition of an ex-patriot though. Useless rag of a paper..........although the sports section is quite good.

Or on the other hand did they just add a digit by mistake, for example is it 3720 instead of 37020?
4000 I'd agree with, because it seems to be something like 75 to 150 in each major city (very rough, unscientific estimate based on various scraps of info, admittedly)

Would you expect to know all Brits in Poland?

The raw data is quite interesting. It throws up a lot of surprises. For example there are supposedly only three Jamaicans in Poland (I know two personally, so that's hard to believe), there are 188 Saudis (seems a lot) but only 408 Nigerians (far to few). Supposedly there are no North Koreans in Poland, which is clearly wrong.

Can a mod advise if I can post the raw data of Poland here?

Go ahead, If anything, it will go to the random thread.

It all sounds a bit Pete Tong, doesn't it. Whilst I have noticed a few more British accents here of late, they number <10. So that doesn't really account for the implication of thousands. If there were, the shops would stock more British lines of food, I think. They certainly stock a lot of lines for other communities whose presence is much more numerous, but sadly not much in the way of British food for the simple reason that there aren't many of us here.

Is there any point in me going to the effort of extracting the raw data and converting it to a form that can be posted here if it's just going to be binned?

World 663,755
Other North 5,523
Other South 1,841
Afghanistan 152
Albania 135
Algeria 625
American Samoa
Andorra
Angola 62
Anguilla
Antigua and Barbuda 4
Argentina 293
Armenia 2,256
Aruba
Australia 974
Austria 4,061
Azerbaijan 285
Bahamas 0
Bahrain 9
Bangladesh 107
Barbados 11
Belarus 81,363
Belgium 5,593
Belize 1
Benin 4
Bermuda
Bhutan 0
Bolivia (Plurinational State of) 52
Bosnia and Herzegovina 3,727
Botswana
Brazil 280
British Virgin Islands
Brunei Darussalam
Bulgaria 1,854
Burkina Faso 1
Burundi 8
Cambodia 28
Cameroon 40
Canada 3,163
Cape Verde
Caribbean Netherlands
Cayman Islands
Central African Republic 9
Chad
Channel Islands
Chile 64
China 1,262
China, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region 0
China, Macao Special Administrative Region
Colombia 133
Comoros 17
Congo 114
Cook Islands
Costa Rica 39
Côte d'Ivoire 5
Croatia 843
Cuba 242
Curaçao 7
Cyprus 223
Czech Republic 4,836
Democratic People's Republic of Korea 0
Democratic Republic of the Congo 16
Denmark 957
Djibouti 0
Dominica
Dominican Republic 22
Ecuador 49
Egypt 485
El Salvador 1
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea 26
Estonia 214
Ethiopia 47
Faeroe Islands
Falkland Islands (Malvinas)
Fiji 10
Finland 269
France 27,991
French Guiana
French Polynesia 5
Gabon 10
Gambia 7
Georgia 350
Germany 81,779
Ghana 39
Gibraltar
Greece 3,321
Greenland 6
Grenada 6
Guadeloupe
Guam 0
Guatemala 7
Guinea 61
Guinea-Bissau
Guyana 28
Haiti 0
Holy See
Honduras 7
Hungary 1,440
Iceland 528
India 919
Indonesia 122
Iran (Islamic Republic of) 248
Iraq 456
Ireland 8,136
Isle of Man
Israel 372
Italy 10,647
Jamaica 3
Japan 547
Jordan 147
Kazakhstan 4,934
Kenya 66
Kiribati
Kuwait 206
Kyrgyzstan 134
Lao People's Democratic Republic 15
Latvia 1,662
Lebanon 411
Lesotho 0
Liberia 0
Libya 257
Liechtenstein 0
Lithuania 54,057
Luxembourg 248
Madagascar 12
Malawi 0
Malaysia 44
Maldives
Mali 33
Malta 15
Marshall Islands
Martinique 0
Mauritania 0
Mauritius 4
Mayotte
Mexico 227
Micronesia (Federated States of)
Monaco 26
Mongolia 345
Montenegro 64
Montserrat
Morocco 341
Mozambique 29
Myanmar 6
Namibia 6
Nauru
Nepal 60
Netherlands 2,776
New Caledonia 0
New Zealand 114
Nicaragua 6
Niger 4
Nigeria 408
Niue
Northern Mariana Islands 0
Norway 1,638
Oman 3
Pakistan 229
Palau
Panama 36
Papua New Guinea 0
Paraguay 3
Peru 120
Philippines 209
Poland
Portugal 147
Puerto Rico 0
Qatar 27
Republic of Korea 127
Republic of Moldova 595
Réunion
Romania 2,659
Russian Federation 40,879
Rwanda 6
Saint Helena 0
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Lucia
Saint Pierre and Miquelon
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Samoa
San Marino 0
Sao Tome and Principe 0
Saudi Arabia 188
Senegal 95
Serbia 1,109
Seychelles 10
Sierra Leone 10
Singapore 16
Sint Maarten (Dutch part)
Slovakia 1,389
Slovenia 164
Solomon Islands
Somalia 15
South Africa 408
South Sudan 66
Spain 5,166
Sri Lanka 93
State of Palestine
Sudan 55
Suriname 0
Swaziland 0
Sweden 1,401
Switzerland 1 088
Syrian Arab Republic 631
Tajikistan 63
Thailand 105
The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia 284
Timor-Leste
Togo 14
Tokelau 0
Tonga
Trinidad and Tobago 3
Tunisia 439
Turkey 937
Turkmenistan 58
Turks and Caicos Islands
Tuvalu
Uganda 68
Ukraine 221,307
United Arab Emirates 134
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland 37,020
United Republic of Tanzania 74
United States of America 14,651
United States Virgin Islands
Uruguay 101
Uzbekistan 532
Vanuatu 0
Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of) 78
Viet Nam 2,992
Wallis and Futuna Islands 0
Western Sahara 0
Yemen 123
Zambia 45
Zimbabwe 111

It is not wrong

So who do you suppose staffs the North Korean embassy in Poland? Martians? And then there are those poor sods up in the shipyards.

Thanks Harry.

Gosh I have to chuckle when I read the low statistic for several of the nationalities here! 100% wrong, for sure. I don't know how they calculate the data but it seems to be very, very wide of the mark for several if not all nationalities. If they're the 2012 figures, they weren't even right then, IMO.

Who said there is North Korean embassy in Poland? thinking doesn't hurt.

2013 data. You can download the data from here:
un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/data/estimates2/estimatesorigin.shtml


I know there is one. I went to a party there back in 2006 or 2007 which Roger Sanchez played at, it was sponsored by Bacardi. The embassy is very close to Poland's first BMW dealership and one of Warsaw's oldest shopping malls. The guy who does my satellite equipment also does that embassy's. Doesn't a little local knowledge go a long way?

I'd guess from the size of the embassy that there would be about 20 Korean staff there.


For a start the brother of the former dictator of North Korea did: his name is Kim Pyong-il and he's the ambassador of North Korea in Poland.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Pyong-il

Both of his children live in Poland (as does his wife) and went to university here:

dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk03100&num=2040

So that's four North Koreans you want us to believe don't exist. Got any more pearls of knowledge about Poland to share with us.

Given that the data for other nationalities is very clearly wrong, one does have to wonder how much (or perhaps how little) faith one can put in the figure of 37,020 Brits in Poland.


Sorry to quote myself, but that number is simply laughable. There are six times that number of Vietnamese in Warsaw alone and at least ten times that number in Poland. If the survey is so badly out about Vietnamese, it most probably is about Brits too.

Now that I think about it, from memory in the 2011 census there were in the region of 2,000 people in Poland who declared they were ethnically British. Perhaps the UN transposed the numbers of Brits and Vietnamese!

Maybe it's true and there are thousands here because I'm certainly seeing something of a real increase in British number-plates on cars as I wait at bus stops and survey the passing traffic! (Or maybe it's more like in anticipation of a relaxation in the regulations about legalising right hand drive cars from January.)

And also the Pole's living in the UK bringing car's back to Poland because they are cheaper here, apparently.

Yes, that's also what I was hinting at, and yes again the price of used cars in PL is rather high. I think I'll stick my neck out and say 50% more has been my experience generally, occasionally pretty much double.

The funny thing is though, you never see them on the streets. Maybe I am looking in the wrong places or live in the wrong neighborhood, but I am often wondering where they hide themselves...Except for Wólka Kosowska that is of course.

Usually they are busy teaching english or lying drunk somewhere or even getting punched by the clubs security personnel:)

I see Vietnamese people almost every day. One of the most popular places for them to live is the Osiedle Zelazna Brama (some sources say that that is where most of the city's Vietnamese live), hence the name you sometimes hear for that area: Little Vietnam. There's also a second cluster of Vietnamese (and other Asians) out in Raszyn, mostly people who work at the Wolka Kosowska wholesale trade center.

The second biggest foreign buyers of property in Poland are the British, after the Germans.

So 37k isnt very surprising.

Link to this stat please? Of residential property to live in? Or commercial buildings? Or lets to rent out? It is indeed fairly common for flats to be owned by Poles in the UK and let out, but private Britons are definitely not buying res property in anything other than the smallest of trickles. British owned developers? Hmm, well perhaps there's 1 or 2.

Highly unlikely from the agents I spoke to (dozens) not one mentioned buyers from the UK. They cited Germans, Italians, Spanish, Norwegians. There are very few Brits here in this city, between 100 and 150 max from my enquiries, and almost none are owner occupiers.

There's no way 37000 Brits live in Poland. It's more like 4000.

Having googled, it seems the British Emb in Warsaw said 2500 in 2007, so if one imagines the number was really double that back then, I'd still doubt it would leap from 5K to 37K in 7 years. There's very little in the way of financially viable job opps for anyone from the UK etc even if they have programming skills, as wages are 1/3 or 1/4 or worse. The only Brits here usually are entrepreneurs and managers of big multinationals on UK money while posted here, plus of course a few with ties who make ends meet with family businesses giving them work or a measly income from teaching or whatever.

theguardian.com/world/2007/dec/12/poland.helenpidd

warsawvoice.pl/WVpage/pages/article.php/30464/news

Warsaw Voice, front page article. You realise you are making a massive asumption based on where you live and how far you can see.
There are a lot of British in Krakow for instance. Given the size of the trade between the countries its a belevable numbet. nothing like the million plus who live in Spain or the nearly 1 million Poles in the UK.

Thanks but I am very far from convinced. There is a slight chance commercials are being bought but it's not res and it's not 37K. I prefer the embassy as a source of info rather than a commercial enterprise and a pretty obscure one at that with no numbers and no detail. You should note the article appears to be sayingbuy now or miss the boat, foreign money's coming! That should say plenty to one's inner voice.

There's not one jot more reason to believe 37K Brits here having read that. I still reckon it's 4000 and probably will remain there or fall as the country's economic situation looks to be heading for choppier waters. Looks like it's a credit driven respite if anything now. Anecdotally, locally, things are far from buoyant. And recruiting programmers from overseas as is happening here adds to the impression of cost cutting galore to stay afloat.

Another claim by a brit,but was 6 years ago so maybe now is more?