Poland’s main opposition party, the Conservative (PiS), has proposed legislation banning the entry of people from some countries in the Middle East and Africa.
That was, it said, designed to work as a means for stopping Germany sending migrants who have illegally crossed the border back to Poland.
The move by PiS on July 2 came in response to the announcement made by Prime Minister Donald Tusk that his centre-left government was reintroducing border controls with Germany and Lithuania in an effort to stem what it said was an uncontrolled flood of migrants.
The head of the PiS parliamentary caucus Mariusz Błaszczak said it was “too little, too late” because the “crisis has been going on for months” and “requires far-reaching action”.
Błaszczak announced that the PiS would submit a bill to parliament introducing a temporary ban on entry to Poland for third-country nationals from “specific countries outside Europe whose citizens illegally cross borders”.
On June 30, the PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński called for an “immediate ban on entry to the territory of Poland for people from the Middle East and North Africa” but did not specify what countries were to be included in that ban.
On July 2 Błaszczak said they would be selected based on analysis of data showing which nationalities most often crossed borders illegally or were being transferred to Poland from Germany.
He would not be drawn on whether the countries he was talking about were the same on which the Tusk government has launched an information campaign to discourage illegal entry into Poland through Belarus – including Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan and Egypt.
The Tusk government has continued the policy of its predecessor of fortifying the border with Belarus to stop illegal entries. It went a step further recently when it banned asylum claims on that frontier. As a result the number of attempted illegal crossings on the border with Belarus has fallen markedly.
It was now the Western frontier with Germany and the migrants were being sent back to Poland from that country, which has caused political turmoil.
Many of those returned have been Ukrainians but others included Africans and Asians who had either claimed asylum in Poland, and therefore should remain there, or had been passing through after entering illegally.
It was those crossings the PiS proposal was meant to stop.
“After the introduction of this law, Polish border guards would be able to prevent citizens of these countries from entering our territory,” said Błaszczak. “So those who are today being transferred from Germany would not be able to do so.”
The migrant returns executed by Germany have taken place as a result of European Union regulations and the reintroduction of German border controls on the Polish frontier. Local groups in western Poland, though, have attempted to stop the migrants entering the country.
The PiS has supported that “border defence movement”, as it described those involved as “Polish patriots who took matters into their own hands when Donald Tusk’s state abdicated from its responsibilities”.
The Tusk government’s interior minister Tomasz Siemoniak on June 30 criticised the actions of the citizen groups on the border. It claimed such “citizen patrols” were disrupting the work of border guards and fuelling false narratives about the numbers of migrants involved and the countries they came from.
The PiS hit back at Tusk and his Civic Coalition (KO) party, reminding it that when it had been in opposition its MPs had on several occasions disrupted the work of border guards during the crisis on the border in Belarus in 2021.
Back in 2021 the KO had protested at what it called the inhumane treatment of migrants. Some of its parliamentarians went to the border with humanitarian aid agencies to monitor the actions being taken by border guards.
