The Porous Border Woven with Prejudices and Economic Interests. Polish Border Admission Practices in the Time of COVID-19

Witold Klaus

doi:10.3390/socsci10110435

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely restricted global movement, thus affecting migration processes and immigrants themselves. The paper focuses on the evaluation of bordering procedures and practices introduced by the Polish government in the time of the pandemic. The aim is to highlight the duality in the admission processes at Polish borders between labour and forced migrants, which have been driven, as I argue, by economic interests and the xenophobic attitudes of the government. The paper is based on interviews with experts assisting migrants during the pandemic in Poland, whose direct contact with thousands of clients has allowed them to acquire broad knowledge of how the new legal provisions have affected different groups of immigrants. The data confirms that the Polish border is very porous. It has been almost completely closed to asylum seekers, especially those fleeing from Muslim countries, for whom the only option is to cross the border illegally. Only one exception was made for Belarusians, who were cordially welcomed at the border while escaping persecution in their home country in the wake of their protests against Lukashenko’s regime. Economic migrants, on the other hand, exist on the other side of the spectrum. For immigrant workers, borders have remained open throughout the whole pandemic. Moreover, some further measures facilitating their arrival were introduced, such as de facto lifting of quarantine for seasonal farm workers.

Highlights

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented process of immobility for billions of people globally
There is an extensive body of literature about the ambivalent attitude of Polish authorities towards immigration: the far-right government of ‘Law and Justice’ party, which has been ruling since the end of 2015, came to power using anti-immigrant and xenophobic slogans in the election campaign
They stoked fear of ‘others’ caused by the so-called refugee crisis of 2015–2016 (Koulish and van der Woude 2020), resulting in a drastic deterioration of the public’s attitude towards refugees in Poland (Pedziwiatr and Legut 2016; Jaskułowski 2019). This fear was artificially orchestrated by politicians, because no people from the Mediterranean region, Africa or Central Asia had come to Poland seeking international protection—whether in an illegal manner, nor legally, i.e., through resettlement or relocations in which Poland refused to participate (CJEU 2020)

Summary

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented process of immobility for billions of people globally. There is an extensive body of literature about the ambivalent attitude of Polish authorities towards immigration: the far-right government of ‘Law and Justice’ party, which has been ruling since the end of 2015, came to power using anti-immigrant and xenophobic slogans in the election campaign They stoked fear of ‘others’ caused by the so-called refugee crisis of 2015–2016 (Koulish and van der Woude 2020), resulting in a drastic deterioration of the public’s attitude towards refugees in Poland (Pedziwiatr and Legut 2016; Jaskułowski 2019). As a result of this process (which the government neither supported nor opposed), from 2018 onwards, Poland began to gradually emerge as a country of immigration In recent years, it has, been leading the list of EU countries with the highest number of newly admitted immigrants (Solga and Tereszkiewicz 2020). With the reluctance of the government and society’s restraint towards migration and the simultaneous blending of many migrants into the local labour markets, Poland is not unlike, say, Italy from the first decade of the 21st century (Ambrosini 2013)

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