Poland integrates immigants

Ambassador Sobków

Responding to the liberal U.K. newspaper the Guardian Ambassador Witold Sobków  had his response published today.

Having read your article (‘Poles don’t want immigrants. They don’t understand them, don’t like them’, 2 July), let me assure you that the Solidarność generation is “eager to prove its own solidarity”, but the expression of such solidarity must be multidimensional. The article does not mention at all what Poland has been doing for immigrants and refugees from eastern Europe.

As our frontier is also the EU external eastern border, we successfully integrate thousands of people who have come to Poland from eastern Europe and have found their home in our country. Some have Polish roots or have relatives in Poland, like the group recently evacuated from Donbass, fleeing the fighting with Russia-backed separatists. Others simply want to settle down in my country, like the Vietnamese community. About half a million Ukrainians live and work in Poland, and they are welcome, which is not well known in the west.

Despite little enthusiasm for a mandatory quota system imposed on us, Poland is willing to respond positively and to welcome some refugees from other regions than eastern Europe. We are working on procedural and legal aspects of such a decision. We need a complex endeavour to identify migrants who really need to be protected and to prepare centres that would house them. We await some financial, operational and legal guidelines from the commission.

If the conflict in eastern Ukraine escalated (let’s hope not), the Polish-Ukrainian border might be crossed by hundreds of thousands of refugees. We believe in solidarity, solidarity for all.

Witold Sobków
Ambassador of the Republic of Poland