As of late May, in the three months since Russia invaded Ukraine, 6.8 million refugees had fled the war into other countries. The majority, some 3.6 million people, headed to Poland, while another million went to Romania. European Union nations and others began offering visa waivers and other schemes to help Ukrainians. The UK, for example, is currently home to about 60,000 refugees from Ukraine.
Further east of Europe, the people of Afghanistan are experiencing conflict which has lasted for over 40 years. More than 2.6 million Afghan refugees are registered with the UN’s refugee agency alone, with an increasing number of people fleeing the country in the wake of the Taliban takeover.
Do people think that refugees from one of these two countries deserve more help than the other? Are people’s views mirroring the racist double standards that characterised much of the coverage of conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East? We set out to find out what the British public believes. Caught between their desire to show solidarity for people affected by war and their evergreen concerns that too many people are coming to the UK, legally or illegally, we wanted to know how recent events have shaped their views.
