ecs.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 Polishcities 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