Poland, Refugees, and the Long Run
Poland is enjoying something of a reputational renaissance in the West. Since 2017, the country had been in the doghouse with the European Union, after Poland’s government passed reforms that severely limited the independence of its judiciary. More recently, Poland angered international observers when local authorities in certain regions began to establish “LGBT-free zones”. The government has also managed to turn the largest public broadcaster into a propaganda mouthpiece for the state.
But with the war in Ukraine, Poland has seen an opportunity for liberal redemption. As of May 10, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that Poland had granted over 3.2 million Ukrainian refugees temporary protection status, more than all other countries combined (and equivalent to 8% of Poland’s entire population). This status means that migrants have at least eighteen months until they need to apply for formal asylum within the European Union or return to Ukraine. While in Warsaw in late March, President Biden lauded Poland’s efforts to welcome Ukrainian refugees; the US has sent more than a billion dollars in humanitarian aid to the region, much of which has gone to supporting Polish refugee infrastructure.
The million dollar question, though, is how long this will hold. The Polish government has prepared for a lengthy hosting period by enrolling refugees in the public healthcare system, opening Polish schools to Ukrainian children, and granting state ID numbers to those refugees who seek to find jobs. Ukrainian refugees are able to claim unemployment benefits as if they were Polish citizens. But as the war nears the three-month mark, Polish volunteers in charge of refugee processing and coordination return to work and organizers repeatedly warn that their cities are “bursting at the seams.” Nearly all of the refugees resettled in Poland are housed in private homes, where host families receive $10 per day per refugee hosted - a tight budget even for the short haul. The $75 initial stipend given to refugees themselves upon registering in Poland is also nearing the end of its longevity.
Certain resources, moreover, are inevitably scarce. Independent housing, for instance, will become necessary if the war does not end before host families gradually decide they want their space back - this is perhaps the ticking time bomb that worries government officials and advocates most. As of April, some refugees appeared to be headed home to Ukraine, temporarily easing housing pressures; NPR reported that on some days as many Ukrainians were entering Poland as leaving. But if Ukraine were to lift its moratorium on males of fighting age leaving the country (as they may have to, if the war settles into contained conflict in only certain regions) and family reunification abroad were to begin, separate housing for Ukrainians in Poland would become extremely urgent.
(Somewhat ironically, Poland’s construction industry has been decimated by knock-on effects of the Russian invasion; around 400,000 builders in Poland were Ukrainian men, the vast majority of whom returned to Ukraine in late February. Reports of stalled construction projects abound, and the feasibility of a mass housing buildup is low. A further irony: Poland has a declining population, an unemployment rate of 3%, and a rapidly increasing number of elderly in need of care. If Ukraine were to lose its war and many refugees were to remain in Poland, the Polish economy and industries like this one would likely see long-term gains).
A few other relevant political factors may have expiration dates. Law and Justice, the party that currently controls Poland’s presidency and its lower house of parliament, has been friendly both in policy and rhetoric to Ukrainian refugees - “I have this deep sense that we have to do everything to help Ukraine,” President Andrzej Duda told journalists in April. But friendliness to refugees in Poland is new: in 2015, as a wave of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa sought refuge in Poland, Law and Justice party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski warned that they carried “parasites and protozoa,” and would “use churches as toilets” as they sought to impose Sharia law on Europe. In August, as thousands of migrants from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan massed at Belarus’s border with Poland, Duda himself labeled their arrival as a “hybrid war” and encouraged increased military spending.
One conclusion might be that sympathy for Ukrainian refugees is less born from innately progressive immigration politics and more from mutual enmity for Russia, which Poland has seen as an aggressor since the Second World War and several decades of Soviet-led communist rule. In several interviews, Polish politicians have emphasized that the invasion of Ukraine is a threat toward Poland as well. Russia is unlikely to ever be seen neutrally in the eyes of the Polish electorate. But as the war drags on and becomes increasingly concentrated in the south and east of Ukraine, the war itself - and therefore also Russia’s evil - may lose critical salience in the Polish electorate’s mind. After infrastructural scarcity, this is a second factor that currently works in refugees’ favor, but could erode over time.
Perhaps more importantly, the baseline sentiment toward Ukrainians in Poland prior to the Russian invasion was cool. Only 40% of Polish people felt sympathetic to Ukrainians in 2015, one year after the outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine in the Donbas; only 47% agreed that Ukrainians and Poles were culturally similar. Ukrainians were also consistently trusted lower as potential neighbors, coworkers, and partners than Western Europeans, Americans, and Canadians. Several things can explain this - but especially among elderly Poles, there remains a highly salient memory of the Volhynian massacre, a World War II-era ethnic cleansing of 50,000-100,000 Poles living on present-day Ukrainian soil. A family member of mine in Poland, whom I’ve known to be politically progressive all my life, remarked to me recently that they feel sympathy toward Ukrainian refugees, but will never be able to provide them material support. The Polish parliament adopted a resolution in 2016 labelling the massacre as a genocide perpetrated by Ukrainians.
Recent surveys show that as many as 60% of Poles support accepting all Ukrainian refugees, and another 35% support accepting just the “neediest” ones. It will doubtless be a long time before these figures begin to reflect their pre-war counterparts, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine may entirely replace the Volhynian massacre as the most significant historical episode between the two countries. But historical tension between Poles and Ukrainians threatens to reemerge if the conflict drags on and material incentives discourage continued friendliness toward Ukraine. In the short term, Poland has accomplished a remarkable about-face in its refugee policy. But as in all cases of mass migration and integration, it’s in the long run that the country’s commitment will be tested.
Cover photo: Felix Beilin | NU Political Union
