A violent crime was the beginning. A Venezuelan man fatally stabbed Polish woman Klaudia, 24, to death as she was leaving work in a park in the center of Torun, central-north Poland in June.
On Sunday, July 6, thousands of protesters marched silently through Torun following that horrific incident. According to local media reports, far-right Konfederacja political alliance supporters planned the march, and demonstrators carried signs that read “stop illegal immigration.”
Then came the misinformation and rumors. A Paraguayan man allegedly photographed children on a playground on July 14 when someone in Walbrzych, southwestern Poland, called the police.
The man was stopped by the police, but his phone was unincriminated. Two Polish men soon after that began beating him up. A group of about 50 people stormed the hostel where he and other migrants were residing the following day. The owner has since been forced to shut down the hostel after some people threw flares into the building.
Anti-immigrant sentiment in Poland has increased in recent weeks, fueled by far-right rhetoric, which claims that there has been “unconstrained illegal migration” in Poland. Legislators frequently and even encourage claims that migrants take local jobs and that they pose a threat to Poles both physically and figuratively due to their “foreign lifestyle.”
Konrad Berkowicz, a member of Konfederacja’s Konfederacja, said that xenophobia is a crucial component of our national unity. We should cherish xenophobia because it has been condemned and stifled in the West by rapes and terrorist attacks.
Elmi Abdi, 62, a Somali refugee who immigrated to Poland in 1996, claimed that all parties are using us as scapegoats despite the fact that politicians are aware that this is all untrue. Abdi is currently the founder of the Good Start foundation, which assists migrants by providing assistance in terms of legal assistance, language classes, and other issues.
“It’s sad because we [immigrants] do everything possible to work safely here, pay taxes, and become members of society.”
The Polish Migration Forum, a rights organization, has described Poland’s culture as “pre-pogrom-like” as misinformation about immigrants spreads, such as in the Walbrzych incident.
The violence is what makes the current situation unique. The forum’s head, Agnieszka Kosowicz, stated that “we are in a very bad place.” People are insulted, threatened, and displayed hostility and contemptuously in acts of violence already occur. A swift response from the state is required because this situation is very alarming.
Rumors of “illegal returns”
Poland’s border controls with Germany and Lithuania were reinstated on July 7. That was in response to restrictions that Germany earlier in the year made Poland unaffordable.
According to EU regulations, Poland is also currently actively monitoring the return of migrants by the German police, both as asylum seekers and non-asylum seekers. These people first crossed into Germany after arriving in Poland from outside the EU.
Unofficial, far-right patrols have been stationed at the borders to monitor the situation and make “citizen arrests” of people they believe are entering the country illegally, but this is not the case because rumors about “illegal returns” of migrants by the German authorities continue to spread.
The EU charged Belarusian and Russian authorities with inciting the continent’s migration crisis by encouraging people from the Global South to visit Belarus and then travel through Poland to Europe.
Poland constructed a fence along its border with Belarus in 2022 to stop illegal entry of foreigners into the nation. However, the fence didn’t effectively stop people entering.
In order to deter visitors, Poland suspended the right to seek asylum altogether in March of this year.
All of this has heightened anti-migrant fear in Poland, which far-right organizations have gotten even more vocal about to their own political goals.
We are being humiliated, they say.
Anti-migrant marches organized by the far-right Konfederacja party and football fans slurred racist slurs and slogans through 80 Polish towns and cities on Saturday, July 19, bringing the hysteria to a new high nearly two weeks ago.
Nikola, a 16-year-old girl, reported to Al Jazeera that she had traveled 125 kilometers (80 miles) from Gorlice, southern Poland, to the Krakow march. She claimed she came along after watching YouTube videos that claimed Western Europeans were “afraid to leave their homes” due to the large number of undocumented immigrants.
She argued that joining a cause that “unites Poles today” was important to her.
I desired to belong to a group. People are demonstrating to the leaders that Poland is our nation and that they are concerned about security. She argued that we should take every precaution possible to stop what is happening in Western Europe.
She continued, “I want to feel safe in my city, and I’ve already seen a few people who appear to be from elsewhere.”
Nikola walked to Market Square alongside a sizable crowd of several hundred people, many of whom were wearing Polish flags and Wisla football team t-shirts. They passed tourists as they passed, some of whom were filming the protesters.
White-and-red Polish flags were waved proudly among the football fans by three elderly women. The current state has been sufficiently repressed by the country. Danuta, 60, said she was waking up because she was living in fear and suffering. She continued, referring to the right-wing organizations that patrol the Polish-German border and saying that the borders are not sealed and that civilians must guard them.
The march crossed paths with a smaller counterdemonstration led by local left-wing organizations in Market Square, and the two organizations exchanged insults as the police separated them.
No significant incidents were found during the day by the police. However, Abdi and other immigrants Al Jazeera spoke to via phone and confirmed they did not dare to leave their homes on Saturday.
Fans of fake news, the flames
According to experts, false information and fake news about the number of people entering Poland have fueled anti-immigrant sentiment.
Kosowicz claimed that Poland is not experiencing any large-scale irregular migration. People who sought asylum in Poland and then entered Germany are returned within the Dublin procedure, according to EU regulations. In 2024, there were 688 such people, and this year – 318. Nothing about this is new.
In Poland, 2.2% of the population was born abroad in 2023, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) report on the global migration outlook for 2024. Comparable to other European nations like the UK (15.4%), Germany (18.2%), and France (13.8%), this is not very high.
According to the OECD, 152, 000 immigrants in Poland obtained residence permits for more than a year in 2022.
Since 2021, migrants from Global South countries have been attempting to cross the Polish-Belarusian border, but the number of migrants arriving in Europe has not been particularly high either. Official data indicates that 15, 022 illegal crossing attempts were made between January and late June of this year, of which only 5% of the attempts were successful.
In 2024, there were nearly 30, 000 attempts, out of which, by contrast, one-third (10, 900) were successful. Before Poland constructed a fence along Belarus’s border in 2021, there were 52 000 attempted.
Kosowicz also attributes hate attacks to the government, which she claims has failed to raise awareness of the costs and advantages of immigration and development, making foreigners all the more vulnerable.
According to a study conducted by Deloitte and UNHCR, 2.7% of Polish GDP is solely generated by Ukrainian refugees. However, she claimed, “This isn’t the information we hear from politicians.”
Abdi worries a lot about their futures because he is married to a Polish woman who he has two children with.
“Poland welcomed me so warmly when I arrived, and I’m very proud of Poland because it’s where I call home. He fluently told Al Jazeera, “I want it to be safe for everyone.
