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3. Immigration, emigration, and minorities
Available data on immigration and emigration of individual persons indicate a rapid rise in both categories in the immediate years after 1956, reflecting the simultaneous easing of Polish policy on exit visas and encouragement of repatriation from the West. Immigration to Poland rose from 8,500 in 1955 to a high of 95,300 in 1957, but had fallen to negligible proportions, some 800 persons, by 1970. Emigration, which increased from 2,300 in 1955 to a peak of 148,500 in 1957, fell to 10,300 in 1970. Official figures for this period, however, do not include almost 250,000 persons repatriated from the U.S.S.R. between 1957 and 1959 on the basis of the 1956 Polish-Soviet repatriation agreement. The Gomulka regime had pressed the Soviet Union for a new repatriation agreement, mindful that the U.S.S.R. had never fully honored the previous agreements of 1944 and 1945 under which the bulk of the persons under consideration should have been repatriated. Various political motives played a role in this Soviet failure, including the fact that many of the potential repatriates were Jews. Most of the Polish Jews repatriated under the provisions of the 1956 agreement subsequently emigrated to Israel. A majority of the non-Jewish Poles repatriated at the same time were resettled in the former German territories in the west and north of Poland.
Similarly, official emigration figures exclude the 10,000 to 15,000 Jews who have departed since 1967, as well as the estimated 30,000 ethnic Germans repatriated since the signature of the Polish-West German treaty in December 1970.
Despite the Polish regime's efforts to stimulate the return of expatriates, it continues to take pride in the contribution to other societies of ethnic Poles who emigrated in great numbers for economic and political reasons over the past two centuries. Official 1970 Polish figures, for example, list over 10 million Poles living abroad, including in this definition those of the first and second generation, as well as others reputedly claiming Polish as their mother tongue. Their majority of Polish expatriates so defined, or about 6.5 million, reside in the United States. Other countries with sizable numbers of such persons include the U.S.S.R. with 1.2 million, France with 750,000, Brazil with 840,000, Canada with 324,000, West Germany and the United Kingdom with about 140,000 each, and Australia and Argentina with about 115,000 each.
A nationality agreement between Poland and the Soviet Union concluded in March 1965 theoretically opened the way for the repatriation of the majority of the 1.4 million Polish nationals who, according to the 1968 Polish data, resided in the U.S.S.R. in 1962. As of 1972 there was no reliable information concerning the number repatriated under this agreement. In the absence of corroborating evidence, it is doubtful that the difference between the Polish official figures published in 1968 (1.4 million) and those claimed to reflect 1970 data (1.2 million) is indicative of actual repatriation. Natural attrition, reclassification of such persons by both Soviet and Polish authorities, and statistical correction are the more probable reasons.
Wartime populations losses and postwar territorial shifts transformed Poland from a prewar mosaic of ethnic minorities constituting nearly one-third of the total population into an ethnically homogenous state. The size of the minority population of Poland is not accurately known, since Polish authorities ceased publishing this data in the early 1960's. According to available estimates, Poles constituted nearly 98.5% of the population in 1969, with the following distribution of the minority groups:
| Number | Percent | |
|---|---|---|
| Ukrainians | 180,000 | 0.6 |
| White Russians | 160,000 | 0.5 |
| Germans | 75,000 | 0.2 |
| Great Russians | 20,000 | 0.2 |
| Slovaks | 20,000 | |
| Gypsies | 18,000 | |
| Jews | 12,000 | |
| Lithuanians | 10,000 | |
| Greeks | 9,000 | |
| Czechs | 2,000 | |
| Total | 506,000 | 1.5 |
The slow decline in the ratio of the minority population to total population has been caused by natural attrition and assimilation, as well as by sporadic spurts of emigration. This pertains particularly to Jews and ethnic Germans. Prior to the Polish regime's politically motivated encouragement of Jewish emigration after the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, there were an estimated 25,000 Jews in Poland. This figure, which had been relatively stable earlier in the postwar period, had diminished to about 8,000 to 10,000 by 1972. Because most of those remaining are elderly, the absolute number of Jews is not expected to decline further except by attrition. Most Polish Jews continue to reside in urban areas.
Prior to the 1969 bilateral moves that ultimately led to the negotiation and conclusion of the Bonn-Warsaw accord of 1970, the Polish government consistently held to the grossly understated figure of 3,000 for the German minority in Poland. Conversely, West German estimates of as many as 1.2 million were
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070023-3
