This is an empirical quantitative analysis of the official data coming from the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. The foreign scholars in Poland at the beginning of the 21st century are presented in the context of the global “brain circulation” or migration of highly qualified specialists. The second context is the present Polish academic system. In this paper we discuss characteristics of the analysed data base, universities and colleges where the foreign scholars are usually employed, the academic disciplines they represent, the relations between the number of foreign scholars and the institutional prestige of schools employing them, and conclusions on what we can and cannot learn from the data set analysed here.