ecs.gda.plrequests for refugee status,” up from
62.9% in 2002.SOME REFUGEES MORE ACCEPTABLE
THAN OTHERS
However, public opinion shifts easily and
not all refugees are perceived the same
way. In June 2015 a poll by CBOS showed
that 53% of Polish respondents were
against granting asylum to Africans and
those from the Middle East, while only
36% felt the same way about Ukrainian
asylees.
In September 2015, a poll conducted for
the daily, Rzeczpospolita, determined
that only 16% of Poles were in favor of
welcoming refugees into their country;
and 10% thought Poland should only
receive Christian refugees; while 26%
of respondents were against welcoming
refugees at all. This diffidence towards
asylum seekers was also apparent in the
three out of every 10 respondents’ view
that shutting the EU borders was the
best way to resolve the refugee crisis,
and in the 61% of respondents that said
they would not open their own homes to
refugees.
This growing perception of refugees as
people Poland should keep out can be
seen in another September 2015 poll
conducted by TVN24 news broadcasting
network, with 56% of respondents
saying they did not support their country
accepting refugees.
These negative attitudes might be
explained by Poles’ overestimation of
how many foreigners are actually living in
their country. July 2015 research by the
International Organization for Migration
showed that one in four Poles thought
that foreigners accounted for up to 10%
of Poland’s population, while the actual
percentage is about five times less.
Whereas most recent studies suggest
the majority of Poles are againsthosting refugees in their country, May
2016 research conducted by Amnesty
International that surveyed people across
27 countries reported a different picture.
The global survey found that 56% of Polish
interviewees said they would accept those
fleeing war or persecution, while 43% of
Poles agreed their government should do
more to help refugees.
REFUGEES WELCOME WITH BREAD
AND SALT
Refugees Welcome Poland (RWP) is the
Polish initiative of a German project that
started in November 2014 and is now
active in 12 countries. “We decided to
do something when the media discourse
around refugees in Poland became more
widespread, and at the same time more
hateful towards them. We couldn’t accept
that, and wanted to change it,” recounts
Zofia, one of the founders of RWP.
At the end of May 2016, the project
counted only 40 volunteers and about
60 Polish households that were ready to
provide accommodations to refugees.
Zofia explains that one reason the
numbers seem scarce is because the
project only focuses on hosts living in
Poland’s two major cities, Kraków and
Warsaw. There, Zofia says, “refugees can
get support from NGOs and can form
communities with other immigrants from
their countries.”
Zofia also offers another possible reason
more Poles are not eager to join the
project: “the media and government
discourse on refugees, and simply the fear
of the unknown,” she says.
Unfortunately, fear of the unknown
sometimes triggers enmity. “We have
been receiving a lot of hate recently,
although the initial reactions to our
project were optimistic,” Zofia laments,
and then explains that, “the hate speech
towards refugees and foreigners in
general is definitely growing.” Relocationecs.gda.plBoth the former and the new Polish
government that emerged after October
2015’s parliamentary election initially
opposed the quotas set by the EU
Commission. Former PM Ewa Kopacz
stressed how her country could only
help genuine asylum seekers and not
new economic migrants, but eventually
her government agreed to welcome the
7,000 refugees Brussels had allocated to
Poland. However the government now
in charge is openly against welcoming
anyone arriving from areas outside of
Europe except for those citizens of the six
former USSR republics.
The current Polish position on refugees
resembles the Hungarian one. However,
when looking into official data on asylum
seekers in Europe, Hungary received
174,000 asylum applications in 2015 – 17
times more than Poland. Adjusting for the
fact that Hungary only has a quarter of
the population Poland does, means that
for every 1.78 asylum requests Hungary
receives per 100 inhabitants, Poland only
receives 0.03 – that is 68 times less. So
when it comes to refugees, these numbers
illustrate that Warsaw’s situation is not
comparable to the one in Budapest.
Despite its rich multicultural past, with
significant Jewish, German, Lithuanian
and Ukrainian minorities living side-by-
side within its old pre-WW2 borders,
contemporary Poland is one of the most
homogenous states in the EU. Today
the country hosts just about 700,000
foreigners, approximately 2% of the
country’s population. Nearly 94% of the
Polish residents that took part in the 2011
national census identified themselves as
“ethnically Polish”.
The most numerous foreigners in Poland
now are the Ukrainians, Belarusians
and Vietnamese, while the presence
of refugees is still marginal. Because
meeting a foreign face in major Polish
cities is still rare today, millions of Poles
born after WW2, who grew up during
the Communist regime have no first hand
familiarity with foreigners, and are often
diffident towards them.
One of the very first long-term opinion
polls on refugees held in post-89
democratic Poland, shows how mercurial
public opinion can be on this issue. 8 In
1992, when respondents were asked what
actions should be taken towards refugees,
55% of them answered “Let them stay in
Poland longer,” 12% said “Take actions
to send them back home,” while only 3%
agreed that refugees should stay in Poland
permanently. Fast forward five years later
to 1997, and support for refugees staying
in Poland longer had fallen to 29%, and
support for sending refugees back home
had risen to 31%, but support for letting
refugees stay in Poland permanently had
also risen to 14%.
In 2005, a poll on foreigners and refugees
was held in Poland, Hungary, the Czech
Republic and Slovakia, and Poles seemed
much more open to foreigners and
refugees than their neighbors: 62% of
them believed that foreigners had the
right to settle in their country, while only
23% of Hungarians, 26% of Czechs, and
34% of Slovaks said the same. However
only 13% of Poles were ready to accept
political refugees, while 31% said they
were not.
In 2008, 53% of the Polish respondents
in another poll, 10 agreed that their
country should uphold its duties as an EU
member and take part in finding solutions
to the “refugee crises”. Solidarity with
asylum seekers was confirmed when
the latest refugee crisis had already
begun. The European Social Survey
conducted between April and September
2015 showed that 63.4% of the Poles
questioned believed their government
“should show kindness when examiningADVERTISEMENT