A majority of Poles now favour accepting refugees into their country. The findings, from a new poll, mark a turnaround from recent years, when, in the wake of the 2015 migration crisis, most people in Poland were opposed to receiving refugees.
In the survey, carried out by Kantar on behalf of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 62% of respondents agreed that “Poland should willingly receive refugees, because we would also want to be well treated”. Only 18% said that they disagreed.
The poll also found that most Poles (63%) agree that refugees “can increase our country’s workforce, which is useful with an ageing society”, while exactly half agree that “refugees enrich Poland’s cultural life and make society more open to new ideas”. Only 19% and 24% respectively disagreed with those statements.
The findings are the latest evidence that the anti-refugee sentiment aroused in Poland after 2015 is now abating. Last year, an international study by Gallup found that, between 2016 and 2019, Poland recorded one of the biggest increases in acceptance of migrants among the 140 countries surveyed.
Regular polling by CBOS, a state-linked research agency, showed that, in early 2015, a majority of Poles (58%) agreed that “Poland should accept refugees from countries affected by armed conflicts”.
However, the migration crisis of that year saw attitudes significantly harden, and by 2017 CBOS found that only 29% of Poles thought that their country should accept such refugees while 63% were opposed. Another pollster, IBRiS, also found 60% of Poles opposed to accepting refugees in 2017.
The latest findings in the Kantar survey “show that we are returning to normality”, Sławomir Sowiński, a political scientist from Cardinal Wyszyński University in Warsaw, told the Rzeczpospolita daily.
“Poles are generally very sensitive,” he continued. “When we look at the research conducted before 2015, we see that we showed an attitude of openness at that time.”
“In 2015, the refugee crisis appeared, the media showed us crowds storming Europe, and the United Right [ruling coalition] that was coming to power at that time made it one of the leading issues in the election,” Sowiński told the newspaper. “All this created great fear.”
In 2015, the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party came to power at the head of a new coalition, following a campaign in which it had expressed opposition to the arrival of mainly Muslim refugees.
PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński described Islam as a “cultural offensive” against which “Europe must defend itself”. He warned that migrants were bringing “dangerous parasites and protozoa” to Europe.
Once in power, the PiS-led government refused to accept any refugees from the European Union quota agreed by the previous government, and used public media to stir further fear of refugees.
“Now the emotions have calmed,” a spokesman for the UNHCR in Poland, Rafał Kostrzyński, told Rzeczpospolita. “Politicians have stopped raising fears that someone is storming our borders, taking our jobs or bringing diseases.”
“These results do not surprise me,” added Christine Goyer, the UNHCR’s representative in Poland. “We have been impressed many times by the initiatives undertaken by local authorities, NGOs and ordinary people [to help refugees]. It is very typical of Polish society…Poles are much more ready for it than politicians might think.”
“Poles have a deeply encoded moral obligation to help the weakest,” agrees Bishop Krzysztof Zadarko, who worked on behalf of the Catholic episcopate in attempts to get the Polish government to create humanitarian corridors.
“[Now] it can be seen that, when this subject is free of ideology and propaganda, this sensitivity is reactivated, and that is good,” he continued. “However, I’m afraid that if we asked about accepting refugees from Muslim countries, the results would be different. And this is a sign that we still have things to work on.”
The change in attitudes towards refugees has come as Poland experiences a wave of immigration that is unprecedented in its history and among the largest in the EU. For three years in a row Poland has issued more first residence permits to non-EU immigrants than any other member state.
It is estimated that over two million foreigners now live in the country, making up 5% of the population. Most of those come from neighbouring Ukraine, with the overwhelming majority classified as economic migrants but some also fleeing the conflict in their country.
“A few years ago we [in Poland] were almost ethnically pure,” notes Kostrzyński. “[Now] we have had good experiences with the millions of Ukrainians who came to us, and it makes us more open to other national groups as well.”
Main image credit: Ittmostt/Flickr (under CC BY 2.0)
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.
