Poland has its parliamentary elections coming up in October and conservative Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki is proposing a controversial referendum that he believes will solidify his party’s position. The European Union recently announced a “relocation plan” for the millions of migrants who have entered the EU in the past few years. The plan would include the forced distribution of many migrants to member nations, including Poland. But Morawiecki’s referendum would put the question to his people, asking if they support “thousands of illegal migrants from the Middle East and Africa” being moved to their country. Given the nation’s prevailing attitude toward migrants from other cultures, particularly Muslims, he seems to be betting that the answer will be “no.” This could set up a standoff between Warsaw and the EU which has been building for some time now. (Associated Press)

Poland’s ruling party wants to ask voters in a referendum whether they support accepting “thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa” as part of a European Union relocation plan, the prime minister said Sunday, as his conservative party seeks to hold onto power in an October parliamentary election.

Mateusz Morawiecki announced the referendum question in a new video published on social media. It indicated that his party, Law and Justice, is seeking to use migration in its election campaign, a tactic that helped it take power in 2015.

Poland is hosting more than a million Ukrainian refugees, who are primarily white and Christian, but officials have long made clear that they consider Muslims and others from different cultures to be a threat to the nation’s

You can scream about racism or xenophobia all you like, but Poland has been one of the leaders in taking in Ukrainian refugees from the war, making room for more than a million of them thus far. But as the AP report notes, Poland is an almost entirely white, Christian nation. (Census data shows that 99% of Poles are white.) The Poles, particularly the conservative party backers, have been widely opposed to allowing any sort of mass migration of Muslims into the nation. And I’m guessing that they wouldn’t be overly wild about a large migration of Black migrants fleeing Africa coming to live there either.

With that in mind, a referendum could either confirm that assumption or refute it. And the results would likely steer Morawiecki’s decision in terms of how to respond to the EU. The European Union has been throwing its weight around with its various member nations for a long time now, pushing for more centralized authority and less independence for the member states. Poland has been one of the most skeptical member nations in this regard, and the order to relocate the migrants may finally prove to be a bridge too far.

There’s a certain appeal to the Polish Prime Minister’s approach because it gives a voice to the citizens at a national level. It brings to mind the current illegal migrant crisis in the United States in many ways. None of us ever got the chance to vote on a decision to open the borders and stop deporting illegal aliens while millions of them streamed into the country. Those were decisions made by one man in the White House. Congress didn’t even get to vote on it. So how is that working out for all of you?

Sadly, we don’t have referendums in America at the national level because we live in a representative constitutional republic. (Though some have been arguing in favor of national referendums in recent years.) The best we have are state-level referendums, but there is no mechanism by which you can force all of the states to hold one. I’m sure most of the red states would be in favor of a referendum asking about illegal immigrants if anyone bothered to put one on the ballot. But the blue states would likely never agree because the Democrats are probably terrified of what the results would be.

The next best thing we have is a good old-fashioned election such as the one coming up next year. If enough people are fed up with the country being overwhelmed by foreigners who chose to break our laws and enter the country illegally, there is one thing you can do. Get rid of the corrupt guy who made it happen and replace him with someone – anyone!– who will seal the borders and ramp up deportations to warp speed. Let’s make that our own referendum on illegal migration, shall we?