Abstract
Migration control in Poland is significantly based on internal control practices carried out by street-level bureaucrats representing both law enforcement agents and low-level judges equipped with discretionary power. Based on empirical data from 243 criminal cases of facilitating unauthorised stay in Poland, we reflected on how the mentioned actors and, in particular, criminal judges interpret the existing provisions and to what extent they study cases independently or simply follow the logic of the law enforcement. We based our analysis on two distinct forms of identified cases of ‘supporting’ irregular migration; that is, participation in sham marriages and involvement in document fraud. We conclude that judges lacking expertise in the field relatively new to them may be less prone to question the effects of the preparatory proceedings, and they are not keen to look for any answers for themselves, especially to scrutinise and refer to the European Union law or jurisprudence. In their ‘craftwork’, they face cases that seem similar to them and, thus, not deserving of special attention. Judges lack the broader knowledge and possibly also reflexive thinking in assessing migration-related criminal cases brought to the courts by border guards, who prove their effectiveness inter alia through numbers of detected facilitators, not necessarily the roles played by them. All this may lead to unnecessarily broadening the scope of control over immigrants and a failure in achieving the objectives of criminal provisions.
Highlights
Recent years have witnessed a change in the migration status of Poland
It remains a country of emigration, but more and more often, it is being chosen by immigrants as a destination in Europe, which confirms Poland’s status as a member of the Global North
In the relatively short history of foreigners’ arrivals to contemporary Poland, it has only been in the second decade of the twenty-first century that migration itself and migration policy have become widely discussed and politicised issues
Summary
Recent years have witnessed a change in the migration status of Poland. It remains a country of emigration, but more and more often, it is being chosen by immigrants as a destination in Europe, which confirms Poland’s status as a member of the Global North (see Castles 2004). Relatively easy access to legal entry for certain categories of migrants (especially migrant workers), together with the restricted access to long-term stay or international protection, resulted in a marginal scale of ‘illegal’ migration and predominance of ‘semilegal’ forms of migration and migrant adaptation This is how the phenomenon of irregular migration is perceived and described by the representatives of the migration control apparatus in Poland (Szulecka 2016a). We refer to rulings in cases of facilitating the unauthorised stay of immigrants in Poland issued by criminal courts The latter deal with cases of unauthorised border crossing or the facilitation of irregular migration since they are specified as crimes in the Polish context. Even though they should independently assess those cases based on their own knowledge and using the wide range of tools available to them, it is easier to base decisions on someone else’s assessment (Lipsky 2010: 128–131)
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