In 2004, more than four hundred kilometers of the border between Poland and Belarus became the eastern border of the EU. In 2021, the Belarusian regime encouraged migrants from Africa and Asia to cross it. The Polish authorities, then right-wing nationalists, responded by pushing back the migrants, erecting the metal fence, declaring a state of emergency, curtailing civil liberties, and preventing volunteers from helping "trespassers. All of this violated the Geneva Convention as well as European and Polish law. In the process, legal regulations were introduced - tacitly accepted by the EU authorities - that legalized unlawful practices. They were part of a broader plan to construct a system of “illiberal democracy” in which a democratic facade covers an authoritarian mode of politics. These attempts were facilitated by a popular Islamophobia underpinned by xenophobic and racist imagery. They have been systematically generated by the authorities since the “refugee crisis” of 2015. Their cornerstone is a well-entrenched nationalism, imbued with colonial concepts of Orientalism and Civilizationism. Local specificity boils down to the image of Poland as a bulwark of Christianity and Western civilization. Combined images make it possible to present migrants as a danger to the existing order of things, social cohesion, and national-cultural homogeneity, and justify the “dehumanization” and “animalization” of migrants. A change in the political regime at the end of 2023 to a liberal one has led to a return to democratic principles in general, but the harsh migration policy has not been changed. This is hypothesized to be due to the prevalence of postcolonial images based on a mental construction that introduces a rigid hierarchy of people from different regions/cultures, distancing 'Us Europeans' from 'Them, Distant Aliens'.