To be honest....on any given day five years ago....you could have found over 30k Poles in Germany who were illegally there and paid in cash.
About fifteen years ago in the Ramstein area...there was an entire neighborhood built up (upper-class houses), which Germans bought and rented out to American GI’s. The guy who developed this and handled the building of the 60-odd houses got turned into the government by his wife after she discovered he was having an affair. He kept two financial books, and while the original work to put the structure up was done by Germans....all of the plumbing and electrical work (inside work), was done by illegal Poles who stayed for months to accomplish this. The guy got around a dozen years in prison and the government took most of his profits away (something his wife didn’t anticipate in the divorce case).
this is true, there have always been illegal poles there... As to them flooding the job market, I know my parents who had a condo they were selling a few years back had to have various work done. They were counseled by their neighbors as to who could do the work needed in the apartment, hire a german and get very good work done at a high cost.. or hire a pole on the cheap. It wasn’t that the poles weren’t capable or hard working... they literally didn’t know how to do the work up to the same standards that the germans who had gone through apprenticeships could.