Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, confirmed on July 4 that a referendum on the European Union’s agreement on accepting asylum seekers will take place at the same time as the country's parliamentary elections later this fall. The exact date of the general election is yet to be established. According to the EU proposal, EU countries that refuse hosting asylum seekers would be required to pay a sum of €20,000 ($21,000) per person into a fund managed by Brussels.

Poland, along with Hungary, voted against the deal, with the right-wing authorities in Warsaw condemning the proposal. At the same time the country has issued hundreds of thousands of work permits to people from non-European countries in recent years.

"On one hand, Poland has perhaps the most liberal immigration policy in the whole EU, and on the other hand, they are scaremongering against the same people they are letting in as labor migrants," said Dominika Pszczółkowska, a migration researcher at the Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw.

The state Social Insurance Institution (ZUS) released statistics showing that by the end of 2022, 6.5% of the workforce were foreigners, compared to only 1% in 2014. The uptick is due to an influx of Ukrainian refugees since the Russia invasion in 2022, but it is also due to increasing numbers of people from countries like Georgia, Turkmenistan, Indonesia, the Philippines and Azerbaijan, among other countries.

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Immigration as a distraction from domestic issues

While a scheme from 2007 exists to facilitate temporary work visas for citizens of post-Soviet countries (including Georgia), there are no special schemes for citizens from Turkey and India. "Law and Justice is thus planning to have a referendum on whether Poland should accept several thousand resettled refugees, while at the same time they are issuing work permits to over 200,000 people from non-European countries every year," said Pszczółkowska.

Poland’s Law and Justice party's call to combine the referendum and elections might be an attempt to distract voters from domestic issues, Pszczółkowska thinks. "The ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) is doing everything it can to focus the campaign on immigration and away from themes less convenient for them, such as the high inflation, or pregnant women who have died in hospitals as a result of tightened abortion laws."

PiS may also attempt to use the referendum on the proposed migration plan as a way to polarize the election, and present itself as the party with the toughest stance on border control and safety. The leader of Poland’s largest opposition party Civic Platform (PO), Donald Tusk, recently released a video on Twitter denouncing PiS for their hypocrisy.

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He called for Poland to "regain control of its borders", saying that the government has accepted many workers from Muslim countries to come to the country. "The aim was obviously to pull out the rug from under PiS and not let them exploit this issue in the campaign. However, the language he used resembles PiS rhetoric, which may influence the public discourse on migrants and refugees in Poland. This may also fuel support for a party situated to the right of PiS, Konfederacja (Confederation)," said Pszczółkowska.

"He [Tusk] went too far in trying to take advantage of the political moment," said Łukasz Jankowski, a journalist who covers the work of Polish Parliament (Sejm). Yet, "most centrist and leftist politicians [in Poland] don’t want to relinquish control of migration to the [EU] Commission", he added.

The fear of losing control over national migration policy

In the same vein, the Poles suspicious of the EU solidarity mechanism see it as a means of establishing a precedent which could be used also with other humanitarian crises. "The people who fear the mechanism see it as a way of losing national control over migration policy. Who can say that in two years, the European Commission will not ask Poland to host 2,000 refugees but 5,000 refugees, and so on and so forth?," said Jankowski.

Yet Polish society is certainly not all against refugees, said Pszczółkowska. "Civic Platform voted in favor of relocation in 2015, before the presidential election [in which they lost to the Law and Justice party, editor’s note]. In recent years, they have not said much on the subject. Now only small, left-wing parties are the only ones clearly on the side of human rights."

Refugee and migration issues in Poland are becoming increasingly salient as the parliamentary election of 2023 approaches. The main question is who will decide who can enter and seek asylum and how: the national government or the EU.

The Law and Justice party, being rather Eurosceptic, will oppose handing over any more decisions to the EU. In contrast, the Civic Platform opposition group will likely be in favor of cooperating within an EU framework, observers say.

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