‘Crisis’ and Migration in Poland: Discursive Shifts, Anti-Pluralism and the Politicisation of Exclusion

This essay illustrates the extent to which crisis has had an impact on public perceptions and discourses of contemporary migration in Poland. We focus on the actual moment of the ‘coming together’ between crisis- and immigration-related discourses and argue that this connection has arisen as part of the recent political strategies of Poland’s right-wing populist government ‘Law and Justice’ (PiS) party. The strong anti-immigration and anti-refugee rhetoric orchestrated by PiS across the Polish public sphere has also played a pivotal role in countenancing xenophobic as well as outright racist sentiments in wider Polish public discourse and society.