Poland has urged the European Union to significantly firm up the response to the recent migration crisis in Spain’s African exclave of Ceuta, including making migrants who enter the bloc illegally automatically ineligible for obtaining residence rights.
An extraordinary meeting of EU justice and home affairs ministers held on August 4 heard Poland describing its recent experience with illegal migration allegedly weaponised by Belarus and urged the whole of the EU to adopt the same tough response the country has taken, including a ban on asylum claims for those entering the community illegally.
The videoconference was convened by the Irish presidency of the Council of the European Union and chaired by Irish justice minister Jim O’Callaghan. Poland was represented by deputy interior minister Maciej Duszczyk.
The emergency meeting had been called by the leaders of 22 EU member states who in a letter of August 1 expressed “serious concern” at the situation in Ceuta and warned that the EU could not allow “uncontrolled mass crossings, the instrumentalisation of migration or other hybrid threats” to create the perception that illegal entry into the bloc was possible, or that it could turn into legal residence. The letter was drawn up on the initiative of Italy and Denmark and was not signed by France, Portugal or Luxembourg. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez sent a separate letter the same day also requesting the meeting.
The letter welcomed Spain’s cooperation with Morocco to send most of the migrants back but called for an extraordinary meeting of EU interior ministers to agree a coordinated European response, including the rapid mobilisation of EU instruments and support for Spain in restoring control of the external border.
Commenting on the letter he signed Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk who leads the country’s centre-left coalition government said that Spain and other countries in the EU needed to copy Poland’s example in responding to illegal migration. Writing on X on July 31, he said Spain had to follow the Polish example “if Schengen is to survive”, citing tighter asylum law, hardened border procedures, barriers on the Belarusian frontier and billions of euros invested alongside the deployment of thousands of soldiers, police and border guards.
At the meeting Duszczyk said that illegal entry into the European Union “should automatically exclude” the possibility of obtaining residence permits, and therefore of permanent residence in the future, and warned that migration had to be brought under full control, otherwise it could be used against the values that guide the EU.
Poland also reminded of its own experiences with border protection in the context of the instrumentalisation and weaponisation of migration and adapting legislation to migration challenges, including restrictions on asylum claims.
It also called for the official recognition of migration as a challenge directly linked to security. Warsaw further pressed for greater EU budget support for migration policy, including the financing of physical barriers at the bloc’s frontiers, and for a substantial acceleration of returns and deportations.
The interior ministry said Poland welcomed the fact that a growing number of member states now shared its view of migration.
The EU meeting came in the aftermath of the events of July 30-31 when tens of thousands of illegal migrants forced their way into Ceuta. Many of them swam there from neighbouring Morocco which has been accused of encouraging them to do so. Ceuta’s regional president Juan Jesús Vivas put the number at about 60,000, equivalent to roughly 70 per cent of the exclave’s population of some 83,000. The Spanish government representative in Ceuta, Miguel Ángel Pérez, said on August 2 that at least 72 people had died, some by drowning and others crushed at a breakwater, and that the toll was expected to rise.
Spain’s interior ministry has said smuggling networks used a recent Supreme Court judgment, which found that migrants intercepted at sea while trying to reach Ceuta or Melilla could not automatically be returned to Morocco, to encourage the crossings.
In an attempt to discourage such incidents in future Spain has claimed that the majority of the intruders have been forced to return to Morocco and has highlighted the fact that dozens died in the attempt to cross the border. Interior minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said on August 1 that the situation had been “almost entirely reversed”, and Madrid has installed a 500-metre containment barrier at the Tarajal breakwater.
The scenes at Ceuta led many European leaders to express their dissatisfaction with Spain’s handling of the situation. The broad consensus has been that Spain with its policies of regularising existing illegal migrants into the country has de facto encouraged many more to try in the hope of benefitting from Spain’s lax migration regime.
On April 16 Spain’s government launched an amnesty that allowed undocumented migrants to apply to legalise their stay in the country, with 1,174,978 applications registered by the time it closed on June 30, according to the ministry of inclusion, social security and migration.
Italy suspended its Schengen arrangements with Spain on July 31, closing sea and air borders to non-EU nationals arriving from Spanish territory, after a meeting chaired by interior minister Matteo Piantedosi. Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš said the zone should be closed to Spain immediately, while Sweden and Denmark called for a temporary suspension. Despite the existence of identity checks for those leaving Ceuta there is concern that the Spanish authorities may want to bring in some of those who have remained in Ceuta onto the mainland to lighten Ceuta’s burden of having to cope with thousands of illegal migrants on its shores and streets. Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski pointed out that identity checks already apply between Ceuta and Melilla and the rest of the Schengen area.
Poland experienced a migration crisis on its border with Belarus in 2021, when thousands of migrants from Africa and Asia entered Belarus in order to attempt the crossing into the EU via Poland and the Baltic states. They were encouraged to do so by the increased availability of flights into Belarus and the well publicised fact that Belarus had refused to readmit any migrants who managed to cross the border illegally.
The then Law and Justice (PiS) government responded firmly by fortifying the border with a fence running along it and by ensuring that border guards, assisted by the military, did not allow illegal migrants to enter or stay in Poland. A 5.5-metre steel fence now covers 186km of the frontier in Podlaskie, in northeast Poland, backed by an electronic barrier along 206km, with a further 172km of electronic barrier on the river Bug in Lubelskie, southeast Poland.
Though, because of the large numbers involved and the active help of human rights NGOs many did manage to make it across and then to go on to Germany and other western European states.
At the time the then liberal opposition led by Donald Tusk questioned the tactics employed by the PiS government, expressing doubts about the need to construct the fence and calling for more humanitarian treatment of the illegal migrants who did make it across to Poland.
Though, after coming into office in December 2023 the Tusk administration has actually toughened up the response to illegal migration from Belarus by further fortifying the border, expanding the military’s right to use firearms in protection of the border and by refusing to accept asylum claims from those who illegally cross Poland’s eastern border with Belarus. The government has also imposed a buffer zone along the frontier and says it has spent 3 billion złoty (€706 million) on border security.
When the crisis occurred Poland recorded nearly 40,000 attempted illegal crossings in 2021 alone and despite efforts to discourage and prevent crossings, the figures remained high, with 30,500 recorded attempts in 2024 and nearly 29,700 in 2025, according to the Border Guard.
Numbers of illegal crossings have fallen dramatically this year, with only 235 attempts recorded in the first half of 2026, a more than 65-fold drop from the more than 15,500 registered in the same period of 2025. The interior ministry said none of them succeeded.
Meanwhile, the estimated number of successful crossings has been falling, from 12,000 in 2023, to 5,000 in 2024, 1,700 in 2025, and zero in the first half of this year, according to the Polish interior ministry.
The dramatic fall is however partly due to a change in Belarus’s stance since it entered into dialogue with President Donald Trump’s US administration, freed several Polish political prisoners and even warned the Polish military of an imminent drone incursion in the autumn of last year.
The EU has now backed Tusk’s Polish government in its struggle to protect the border and joined Poland in accusing both Moscow and Minsk of “weaponising” migration in a hybrid warfare attempt to destabilise the EU.
On August 31, 2025 European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen visited Poland’s border with Belarus alongside Tusk and assured him of Europe’s full solidarity with Poland as a frontline state.
It had been less willing to help the previous PiS administration when it refused to provide any additional funding to cope with the situation on that border or with the flood of two million refugees from Ukraine after Russia’s full scale invasion of that country in 2022.
Though at least the EU stopped short of condemning the PiS government for its actions, whereas it had done so when Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had decided to build his country’s wall to stop illegal migrants entering his country.
Despite the political support Poland is now receiving over its stance on illegal migration, the statement issued after the August 4 videoconference did not contain the kind of tough approach advocated by the Poles. It preferred to concentrate on a shared commitment to fighting migrant smuggling networks, reinforcing returns, strengthening EU borders, building partnerships with third countries and improving foresight.
In an attempt to placate rather than criticise Spain the statement added that member states “were united in expressing strong solidarity with Spain”, appreciated its swift and effective efforts to deal with the crisis, and also expressed their condolences for the people who died while attempting to cross from Morocco to Ceuta.
Poland’s opposition right-wing parties have all expressed their horror at the events in Ceuta, calling them an invasion.
Przemysław Czarnek, the candidate for Prime Minister from Poland’s largest opposition party, PiS, and a deputy leader of the party since his nomination by Jarosław Kaczyński on March 7, said that the events in Ceuta showed how unwise the EU had been in attempting to distribute illegal migrants arriving in southern Europe to other member states. At a press conference on August 3 he called the crisis predictable and demanded immediate action from Tusk, along with the passage of a PiS bill tabled in April providing for the automatic deportation of foreign nationals convicted of a second offence.
PiS has consistently opposed that policy and has argued that it only encourages more illegal migrants to attempt to reach the EU.
The Tusk government is also opposed to the EU’s Pact on Migration and Asylum but claims that it has managed to obtain an opt out for Poland thanks to the fact that the country has hosted so many refugees from Ukraine.
Though PiS and other parties of the Polish right argue that this exemption is for one year only and that Poland, unlike the southern Europeans, is not a country with which solidarity is expected in the settlement of migrants but one which in the future will be expected to participate in accepting illegal migrants from other EU states or to have to pay the penalty per rejected migrant if it refuses to participate.
While welcoming the Tusk government’s clampdown on the border with Belarus PiS and the right have pointed out that despite Poland reintroducing border controls with Germany, in retaliation for the Germans first doing it, many illegal migrants which Germany claims arrived from Poland have been turned back across the Polish border.
