Poland has recorded one of the biggest increases in acceptance of migrants among counties included in a study by Gallup, a leading US polling firm.
The finding comes amid a recent wave of immigration to Poland that is unprecedented in the country’s history and among the largest in the European Union.
Today, Gallup published data from an updated version of its Migrant Acceptance Index. It is compiled from survey questions asking people whether they think having migrants living in their country, becoming their neighbours and marrying into their families are good things or bad things.
The index was launched in 2016 in response to the migrant crisis that swept the Middle East, Africa and Europe that year. At the time, Poland was found to be among the least accepting of migrants, with an overall score of 3.31.
In the latest version, based on polling in 2019, Poland’s score has risen to 4.21. That is the 11th biggest upward change among the 140 countries included in both versions of the index.
“Attitudes toward migrants have notably improved in Poland,” notes Gallup in its report. From 2016, the proportion of Poles who saw migrants living in their country as a good thing rose from 28% to 42%, as neighbours from 26% to 38% and as members of the family from 23% to 27%.
Poland’s score still remains well below the countries most accepting of migrants. Canada (8.46) comes in first place, followed by Iceland (8.41), New Zealand (8.32), Australia (8.28) and Sierra Leone (8.14). Among EU countries, Sweden (7.92) is top.
At the other end of the scale, the least accepting country towards migrants is North Macedonia (1.49), below Hungary (1.64), Serbia (1.79) and Croatia (1.81). The only non-European countries to make the bottom ten is Thailand (2.48) in eighth.
The country with the biggest rise in acceptance of migrants from 2016 to 2019 is Moldova (a change of 1.78), followed by Pakistan (1.74), Chile (1.11) and Afghanistan (1.10). Among EU states, only Lithuania (1.01) had a bigger improvement than Poland (0.9).
Amid the migrant crisis of 2015, Poland was initially among the countries that voted in favour of an EU scheme to redistribute asylum seekers from Italy and Greece to other member states.
However, in November that year the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party came to power, following a campaign in which it had raised concern about the reception of Muslim refugees in Poland. They would seek to “aggressively impose” their way of life on Poles, and could carry “parasites and protozoa”, warned party leader Jarosław Kaczyński.
As a result, the PiS government refused to accept a single refugee from its assigned EU quota, eventually leading the European Court of Justice to rule that Poland – along with Hungary and the Czech Republic – had violated EU law.
Polish public opinion was also strongly opposed to the reception of refugees. One poll in 2017 found that over half (51%) of Poles would rather their country leave the EU than be forced to accept refugees from Muslim countries.
Yet during this period, the PiS government has also overseen the largest wave of immigration in Poland’s history. The majority of arrivals have come from neighbouring Ukraine, but there have also been growing numbers from further afield, including Asia and Muslim-majority countries such as Turkey.
In 2017 and 2018, the last two years for which EU-wide data are available, Poland issued more first residence permits to immigrants from outside the bloc than any other member state. There have also been a small but growing number of arrivals from western Europe.
A recent government estimate found that two million foreigners were living in the country at the end of last year, making up around 5% of the population. Despite this year’s pandemic, the number of foreigners with residents permits in Poland recently reached its highest ever level
Many sectors of Poland’s economy, including agriculture, have come to rely on migrant workers. But there has also been growing acceptance of migration and the benefits it can bring among the public.
Main image credit: Slawomir Kaminski / Agencja Gazeta
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
