Anti-Immigration Attitudes in Contemporary Polish Society: A Story of Double Standards?

Abstract From 2015 up until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Polish citizens have undergone a major decline in their willingness to allow foreigners to reside in Poland. The following text empirically investigates whether antipathy to newcomers is driven more by cultural or economic concerns, and what role the ethnicity of immigrants plays in this antagonism. The findings suggest that the ethnicity of immigrants is significant in both the salience of the expressed hostility and in the importance given to individual factors. When considering the acceptance of immigrants of different ethnicity, Poles are most concerned about preserving their national culture, whereas worries about the burden on the national economy are uppermost when considering ethnically similar newcomers. Antipathy against ethnically similar immigrants is also much weaker than against those of different ethnicity. The over-time comparison tells us that support for the government, religiosity, and opposition to universalism values became the most important predictors of restrictionism after 2015. We assume that the increase in anti-immigration attitudes was not that much caused by the unprecedented wave of immigration, but rather by the rule of the nationalist-conservative government which politicized the issue of non-European migration and contributed to the change of public discourse.