Local Responses to Migration: A Case of Poland

The paper aims at analysing local responses to the migration crisis and the increase of inflow of economic migrants to Poland, in the state policy and dominant political discourse. The first part discusses the Polish government’s politics and rhetoric on refugees and migrants. We demonstrate how the Polish government increasingly deployed Islamophobic rhetoric and created a moral panic about Muslim refugees which were contrasted with authentic hard working economic migrants. Drawing partially on earlier anti-Semitic patterns, the government defined Muslim refugees as dangerous Others who are radically different from us 'Poles' and threaten ‘our’ existence as a nation. We show how Islamophobic discourse gained hegemonic status as it was spread by government-controlled public media, the right-wing press, and the Catholic Church. We also briefly analyse popular culture, focusing on nationalist hip-hop music, which under the guise of authenticity and mainstream contestation, reproduced hegemonic anti-Muslim images. In the second part we analyses the local responses to migration crisis and the increase of inflow of economic migrants mainly to Polish cities (Wrocław, Gdańsk. Kraków and Warsaw). This part aims at analysing the process of development of local migration/integration strategies. In case of Poland where there is no explicite formulate migration policy on national level, cities are trying to by-pass national level to create its own responses. To undertake this investigation, a comparative analysis of public policies (cf. Penninx, 2014) focused on the specific content of the integration policies and modes of governance. We analyse the relations of different actors in a multi-level governance context and the direct impact of the transnational EU policy/recourses to local level actors. In this paper, we show how the interconnection of policy levels and the presence of actors in many roles in the process of development of integration policies resulted in the top-down transfer of policy goals.