I have lived in Poland for four years and I am convinced that there are people here who look forward to a diversified Europe. Poles are passionate about traveling, they enjoy discovering new cultures, they love learning foreign languages, and they sometimes contemplate becoming immigrants themselves, leaving behind a country which they associate with its difficult past.
True, procedures to obtain residency and work permits are still difficult for refugees. I would agree that there is a lot to be done in terms of integration in Poland, just as in Europe, USA, Mexico and possibly all over the world. Perhaps the problem comes up when we try to define what a Pole is in terms of religion, ethnical roots, political views or sexual orientation.
Nineteenth century historian Ernst Renan once severely criticised this type of generalization:
One confounds the idea of race with that of the nation and attributes to ethnographic, or rather linguistic, groups a sovereignty analogous to that of actually existing peoples.
Unfortunately we keep pointing the finger at entire countries, saying they are guilty of crimes, they have to pay off their debt, they colonized other countries overseas. In this case, Poland is being singled out for not welcoming immigrants and refugees, instead of looking at the refugee question as a gobal issue.
I brought up the issue while discussing with Yves Rene Musabe – a black-skinned Norwegian living in Poland – and he emphasized that 'the same wind is blowing over Europe.
I would be surprised if Poland was any different in terms of general opinion.
Yves, being Norwegian, feels like foreigner in Norway. He insists that 'Poland is really safe and there are no large minority communities yet'. When people make negative statements about refugees 'they are just following the European wind with a non-existent problem.
By using nations to describe people, we use stereotypes meant to classify us. When such important newspaper – although the journalist is Polish – says that 'Poles don’t want immigrants. They don’t understand them, don’t like them,' it seems like they want to reinforce the mythical divide between West and East. I truly believe in the good intentions of the journalist who penned an article full of statistics and opinions of senior politicians and senior Polish citizens in order to raise awareness of the need for a more serious debate about this global issue.
However, Poland is more than its past. I myself have been working on integrating, here in Katowice. The reason that motivated me was not my experience in Poland, but the divisions I saw in Germany while doing on Erasmus in North Rhine Westphalia, a place with a lot of immigration. People with Turkish roots lived in the same student house, people who identified as white Germans living in their own ghetto.
I am happy living in Poland and proud to say that I contribute to its diversity. Polish companies are glad to hire foreigners. Of course there might be people who fear foreign competition, but needless to say this is an issue present everywhere in the contemporary world.
As the Polish saying - also mythical - goes: Gość w dom, Bog w dom (a guest in the house is God in the house). Set foot in a Polish home and you will be treated like a guest of honor. The next step is ours.
Alexis Angulo has a degree in journalism from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and is currently studying Polish philology at the University of Silesia. He is a recipient of the Bilateral Mexican-Polish Agreement Scholarship.
Author: Alexis Angulo, 03/07/2015