It hasn’t been that long Europe Look again at the broken mirror of the declared values. it happened last year boundary come in Poland Y Belaruswhere Warsaw deployed the army to prevent thousands of refugees from entering the country. Middle East Y Africa After blaming the regime Lukashenko To regulate the flow to destabilize the European Union. “Open door policy, terrorist attack To Western Europe,” said Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak at the time. On this icy border today there is a 186 kilometers of metal wall and erected by the party’s ultra-nationalist government of Poland, more than five meters high Law and JusticeThe same who refused to accept since 2015 Syrian refugees Who drowned in the Mediterranean.
That government that came to power crying in the middle of the Syrian crisis, “Poland for Poles” has now become the most generous in all of Europe. Ukrainian refugees. Their common borders have since recorded 4.4 million crossings Ukraine Since the Russian occupation began at the end of February, at least 1.2 million Ukrainians have registered as residents in the country, demanding the equivalent of the Spanish NIE. “I have no words to describe the incredible generosity of the Poles. “No country has done so much for us,” says 27-year-old Ukrainian Eugenia Glushchenko, who settled in Warsaw a month after the war began.
this avalanche of solidarity It started on the street among hundreds of thousands of Poles who opened their homes to the new arrivals and mobilized to facilitate their forced landing. and continued municipalitieshas traditionally been much more inclined to help migrants and refugees than the far-right government in Warsaw. “For many Poles This is also our war. There is tremendous empathy for Ukrainians because we face the same enemy and the same threat, and they are on the front lines,” says Pawel Kaczmarczyk, director of the Center for Migration at the University of Warsaw.
Two categories of foreigners
Faced with such a response, the Parliament acted immediately. In March, he passed a law allowing Ukrainians access to education and health servicesfree transportation, right to work in the country without a work permit or social helps Just like the Poles got it. Not to mention the tax incentives offered for his hiring, or that by some estimates he pays close to 800,000 euros a day to every house open to Ukrainians. “They were basically created two categories of foreigners“Ukrainians and others who are taking advantage of every opportunity,” says Anna Chmielewska, executive director of Ocalenie, Poland’s largest refugee aid organisation.
HE double standard According to consulted sources, although its presence in public debate is marginal, it does not escape anyone. “The policies of this Government are more complex than they seem. On the one hand, a harsh rhetoric against immigrantsbut on the other hand he accepted largest influx of economic migrants in history Kaczmarczyk said, “The country before the war started in Ukraine. And everything happened very quickly. Out of only 110,000 foreigners registered in 2011 38 million population Poland had a population of about 2.2 million in 2019. More than half of them are Ukrainians who arrived in the middle of the last decade, labor market needs. When the war broke out, more than a million were left who had built extraordinarily useful family and cultural networks.
White, Christian, European Poland
So, rather than a textbook xenophobic government in constant friction with Brussels over its attacks on fundamental rights rather than its brutal immigration policies, the Polish Ruler is probably something else. “They only want white and Christian Europeans”, confirms Ocalenie’s director. An opinion expressed by the Prime Minister without much complex Mateusz Marawieck in 2017. “We want to reshape and re-Christianize Europe”later he told a Catholic TV.
Looking to the future, the main challenge facing the country is Medium-term integration of Ukrainians who chooses to stay “It started to be a little compassion fatigue. When people opened their homes, they thought it would be for a few days, not months. And although people continue to help, they are starting to get tired,” says Kaczmarczyk of the University of Warsaw.
The challenge is monumental. From the start of the war Warsaw population increased by 15%, Krakow 23% and Gdansk 34%, according to a survey presented by the federation of municipalities in May. “Resources are what they are, and they will soon run out. This tensions are inevitable. The only way to avoid this is a coherent government plan to integrate Ukrainians, but it does not exist at the moment”, adds Kaczmarczyk.