Poland has had a fraught immigration policy throughout its post-communist history. Following World War II, and occupied by the Soviet Union, Poland was a satellite nation, in lock-step with Moscow. One Fieldston history teacher noted “For four decades it was an area from which people escaped.” That status has changed in recent years. Situated between the western edge of the former Soviet Union and the affluent West, Poland is a busy transit area for both economic migrants and asylum seekers. Many Middle Eastern, Asian, and African migrants use Poland as a gateway to get to the more prosperous nations of Western and Northern Europe. However, it is quite a difficult task to get into Poland. Poland’s well-entrenched ruling party, Law and Justice, has a stringent anti-immigrant platform. Laws have been passed allowing border guards to expel on-site migrants and refuse asylum applications. Law and Justice has legalized and mobilized migrant pushback in general.
As a nation, Poland vanished in the middle of the 18th century, devoured by Prussia in the west and Russia in the east. It re-emerged in 1918 following the defeat of Imperial Germany and the collapse of Czarist Russia in World War I. Poland suffered tremendously throughout the course of the 20th century. Historian Norman Davies, in his magisterial history of modern Poland, called it “the Devil’s playground.” Poland’s substantial Jewish population, located largely in “The Pale of Settlement,” was virtually annihilated in the Holocaust, while millions of non-Jewish Poles died as well. When The Third Reich fell, Poland became a communist satellite state of the Soviet Union. Poland suffered for around half a century of authoritarian rule as a result. By May of 1989, after years of strikes and agitation by the Solidarity Movement, the Communist Polish government was ousted from power, at the same time as other totalitarian regimes throughout Eastern Europe, and thus began Poland’s transition into a democracy. With the collapse of communism, minority ethnic identity was finally allowed to be publicly cultivated, although there was not much variance in the first place. At the beginning of the 21st century, Poland became a market-based economy, and a member of both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, allied squarely between western and eastern Europe.
Pre-World War II, Poland’s genetic makeup was very different than it is now; Polish lands were even noted for the diversity of their ethnic communities. Before 1939, about 10 percent of Poland’s population was Jewish; there was a wide range of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Germans, and other minorities, while ethnic Poles, who were Slavic and Catholic, only made up two-thirds of the country. The blood-drenched crucifixion during the war, post-war border shifts, massive migrations, and widespread ethnic cleansings created a uniform Poland for the first time in history—fulfilling the dreams of earlier generations of extreme nationalists.
Despite the values of the E.U., Poland still has little appetite for a Western-European style of a multicultural society. Predictably, Poland is one of the most homogeneous countries in Europe, overwhelmingly made up of Poles and Roman Catholics.
In 1989, the first group of asylum seekers arrived in Poland, mainly from the Middle East and Africa. Despite the fact that tens of thousands of people travel through Poland annually, migrant numbers have—until recently—been limited. Currently, there are only an estimated 800 refugees in Poland of various nationalities. In the 1990s, Poles were bleeding out of Poland making their way into Western Europe—many in Great Britain—-because the Polish economy was in crisis. Migrants passed through Poland. Poles on the other hand fled Poland. Some journalists called it a “Polish diaspora.”
It is also worth noting that Poland is a nation that is still rebuilding “civil society.” It is, by national and international standards, a new and recently created nation.
In 2015 a deal in the European Union was supposed to “allocate “160,000 people among E.U. member countries in order to take the load off of Greece and Italy. However, Poland has refused to take in any refugees under the deal.
The main political parties in Poland, such as Civic Platform and Law and Justice, are against accepting refugees. In fact, opinion polls show that around three-fourths of the Polish population is against accepting migrants from Africa and the Middle East.
Jarosław Kaczyński, the Law and Justice party leader and Poland’s ruler, warned that migrants carry “all sorts of parasites and protozoa, which … while not dangerous in the organisms of these people, could be dangerous here.”
Poles reason that Muslim migrants would pose a considerable threat to Poland’s homogenous society. Kaczyński actually said that in order to take in refugees, Poland “would have to completely change our culture and radically lower the level of safety in our country.” He added that Poland “would have to use some repression” to prevent “a wave of aggression, especially toward women” from asylum seekers.
The E.U. put pressure on Poland to accept refugees, but only Poland and Hungary have resisted accepting refugees from this 2015 deal.
Poland’s long-brewing immigration crisis came to a boil in August of 2021 at the Poland-Belarus border and is unlike any immigration crisis in recent history. There’s a standoff between the two countries, leaving the 7,000 migrants stuck at the border as pawns in an extensive geopolitical drama.
The crisis was essentially orchestrated by Belarus’ autocratic president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, in an attempt to stir up trouble for the European Union. In 2020, Lukashenko claimed to have won re-election by 80 percent of the vote. Throughout Belarus, this was widely seen as completely fraudulent, and hundreds of thousands of Belarusians protested as a result. Authorities in Belarus suppressed protestors with force and silenced public opposition to Lukashenko’s win.
In response, the European Union imposed sanctions on Belarus—a country not even a part of the union—and Lukashenko has gone to unconscionable lengths to get them lifted.
In the latter half of 2021, Lukashenko has allowed thousands of visitors into Belarus who want to reach the freer, wealthier countries of Western and Northern Europe. In order to get there, however, the migrants need to get into one of the E.U. member countries bordering Belarus: Poland, Lithuania, or Latvia. Some migrants in Belarus have reported being taken to E.U. borders by Belarusian authorities who virtually force them to cross the border. Those authorities have also apparently given the migrants wire cutters to tear down fences, helped take down barriers, and prevented them from returning to the cities of Belarus. Ultimately, Lukashenko is trying to switch the global and national discussion from political prisoners, torture, and repression under his rule to something external: the crisis at the border.
It is estimated that 4,000 migrants are camped at Poland’s border, and between 10,000 to 20,000 are at the Belarusian border. These numbers are quite minuscule compared to the tense and perilous migrant situations in recent years, but the politics of migration in Europe are so volatile, even a smaller group of refugees can set off a mass amount of tensions. The migrants are camped in a freezing forest and several have died thus far. Many of these migrants are seeking economic opportunity and therefore do not qualify for asylum, but the danger they face on the border is no less serious. The groups that are seen at the Polish-Belarus border are made up of Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, and ethnic Kurds. The right-leaning government in Poland has long called non-European migrants a threat to Polish culture and purity, so its response to this group has been predictably belligerent.
Poles have labeled the crisis as an attack by Belarus and have deployed thousands of troops to keep migrants out. Polish and Lithuanian authorities have reportedly abused migrants and forced them back into Belarus, both sides of the conflict doing whatever they can to get these migrants into a different country. This leaves the migrants stuck in between a potentially lethal international clash.
A striking difference between this crisis and other migrant crises is that it has been virtually impossible for outsiders to be informed on the truth of what is happening. This is partly because Polish and Lithuanian authorities barred journalists and humanitarian workers from the borders. Additionally, anti-immigrant sentiment in the region is overwhelmingly strong; activists who try to help refugees at the border have found their cars smashed up and are berated by soldiers.
The E.U. is firmly united behind Poland in its decision to crack down on immigration, despite the two heavily clashing on immigration policy in the past. The President of the European Council, Charles Michel, says “Poland, which is facing a serious crisis, should enjoy solidarity and unity of the whole European Union.” He goes on to say, “It is a hybrid attack, a brutal attack, a violent attack and a shameful attack. And in the wake of such measures, the only response is to act in a decisive manner, with unity, in line with our core values.”
This places Poland in an uncomfortable position politically because they are reluctant to accept help from the European Union on this front while the two are fighting on other issues, such as LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and the rule of law. The Polish government is foremost striving to present itself as the only savior and defender of the Polish people.
Both Poland and Lithuania have declared states of emergencies and fortified their borders. However, the state of emergency is due to the fact that this crisis is more of a hybrid, calculated attack from Belarus than a migration crisis. This crisis has also boosted the nationalist Law and Justice party, making Poland reluctant to let it go. Mitigating the crisis would reverse the positive response of the Polish people and allow them to remember all the misdoings that Law and Justice has committed.
International law says that the European Union and Poland are obliged to hear the case of asylum seekers. However, it does not seem as though Poland will listen. At a certain point, it is not even about the migrants at all for Poland; it is about the political power that they can muster because of this crisis.
