Foreign women are settling in Poland permanently and deciding to have children there. The number of births by mothers without Polish citizenship has increased almost tenfold in the last eight years, according to data published by the Central Statistical Office.

Last year, 305,000 live births were recorded in Poland, of which 5.5 % were children born to foreign women. In 2015, the figure was just 0.5 %. The number of births by foreign mothers has therefore increased tenfold in Poland in eight years.

Among mothers with non-Polish citizenship, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian women were the most numerous in 2022. Considering Asian countries, the most frequent births in Poland were given birth by citizens of Vietnam, China and India, according to data from the Central Statistical Office.

Women with Ukrainian citizenship far outnumbered other foreign women living and giving birth in Poland (over 82 %). There were more than 13.7 thousand births. In the whole of last year in Poland, Ukrainian women gave birth to twice as many children as in 2021 and almost twenty times more compared to the number of births in 2015.

Despite the increase recorded by the Central Statistical Office, Poland is among the countries with one of the lowest percentages of foreign births. In 2021, Luxembourg ranked first in terms of foreign births, with as many as 65 % of children coming from mothers born abroad. In Cyprus, Austria, Malta and Belgium, around a third of children were born to foreign-born mothers in 2021, according to data from Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union

Compared to 2013, most EU countries showed an increase in the number of live births from foreign-born mothers in 2021. Malta showed the highest increase, from 11 % to 33 % in seven years. This was followed by Greece, where births to foreign mothers accounted for 14 % in 2013 to 20 % in 2020.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński