The number of Ukrainian refugees in Poland, mostly women and children, is on course to top the number of migrants taken by Germany during the 2015 migrant crisis.
Germany, with a population more than double Poland’s, said it had taken in 1.1 million asylum seekers in 2015, when then-Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the country’s borders to migrants to distant Syria — although only around 40 per cent of the influx actually claimed to be Syrians.
Merkel’s decision, which saw her dubbed ‘Chancellor of the Free World’ by TIME, put a great deal of pressure on EU member-states lying between Germany and Syria, many of which did not share her enthusiasm for open borders — and they were left carrying the can when the Chancellor changed her mind and reimposed border controls.
The efforts of Germany and its allies in the EU to mitigate the negative effects of the migrant crisis by imposing compulsory migrant distribution quotas across the bloc led to an ongoing clash with member-states opposed to open borders, Poland chief among them — but, faced with a tidal wave of real refugees from neighbouring Ukraine, the Slavic country has opened its arms.
“1,067,000 people fleeing Ukraine have entered Poland since the beginning of Russia’s aggression against this country,” the Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki, announced on social media on Monday, noting that some 142,300 had been cleared by officers of the Polish Border Guard on Sunday alone.
Normally viewed as something of a malign actor in globalist forums for its opposition to mass migration and European Union diktats, the national conservative Polish government and the Polish people have won plaudits even from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi.
“At the Polish/Ukrainian border I was impressed by the outpouring of solidarity by communities through Poland in support of refugees: many volunteers in action, and piles of donations everywhere, all effectively organized by border guards and local authorities,” the technocrat wrote on social media.
Indeed, Poland’s ambassador to the United States, Marek Magierowski, was recently able to boast that “This is probably the first such migration crisis in Europe’s history in which the host country does not even need to build migration camps because all those 800,000 refugees have already found or will find safe shelter in Polish homes, in Polish boarding houses, [and] student dormitories”.
Pro-migration celebrities and political leaders, such as Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, have often claimed they might personally take in migrants during various crises, but seldom followed through.
Tens of thousands of migrants travelling the United Kingdom illegally in recent years, chiefly by boat, currently have to be hosted in hotels at the taxpayers’ expense, draining the public coffers of billions of pounds annually.