Will Germany introduce border controls with Poland?

During a visit to Poland on Tuesday, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser addressed how Germany could address the rising number of asylum seekers coming into the country.

Published: 30 May 2023 17:43 CEST

Cars at a German-Polish border crossing in Swinemünde, Poland. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Stefan Sauer

In the debate on how to deal with rising refugee numbers and ease pressure on local authorities, Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (SPD) gave a strong “Nein” when asked about whether there would be permanently stationed border controls along the German-Polish border.

However, Germany is set to deploy “several hundred” more police officers there in the near future, Faeser announced during a visit to the Polish border town of Świecko.

This step would help stymie the influx of unchecked migration more than stationary border controls, she said, adding that the close relationship between Germany and Poland would be “massively disrupted” by such controls.

At the border with the Czech Republic, high migration figures have been reduced in recent months through a greater police presence, rather than stationary border controls such as those which already exist in Austria, said Faeser.

Call for stricter controls

However, politicians from the centre-right CDU, including the interior ministers of Brandenburg and Saxony, Michael Stübgen and Armin Schuster, had recently called for firm controls at the border with Poland, pointing out the high influx of asylum seekers coming into their respective states from the neighbouring country.

According to a spokesman for the coordinator of the Polish intelligence services, Stanislaw Zaryn, Poland’s Border Guard has recorded more than 10,000 attempted ‘irregular’ border crossings at the border with Belarus since the beginning of the year and many who cross in such a way continue on to Germany.

By comparison, 15,700 such attempts were registered in all of 2022. On Monday alone, Poland’s border guards registered 67 attempted border crossings.

According to data from the European statistics authority last week, more than 40 percent more initial applications for asylum were filed in the European Union (EU) at the beginning of the year than a year ago.

In Germany, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) registered 110,516 asylum applications in the first four months of the year, or 78 percent more than in the previous year. Most of the applicants came from Syria and Afghanistan.

At the refugee summit on May 10th, the federal and state governments agreed to introduce stationary controls like those at the border with Austria, and at other German borders with neighbouring countries “depending on the situation”.

Regional leaders have long been demanding more help and money to cope with the new arrivals, with many being forced to build temporary shelters.

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With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced on Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.