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The moves are designed to enable Poland to better resist what Prime Minister Donald Tusk said was a “hybrid war” being waged by neighboring Belarus as well as to close loopholes in immigration procedures.
“We have a hybrid, increasingly hot war on the Polish border. The right to apply for asylum is being used in it,” Tusk told reporters after a government meeting on Wednesday.
This “right... is used today, most of all on the Belarusian border, by Poland’s enemies”, he added.
Since 2021, Poland has been faced with a migration crisis on its eastern frontier. The Russian-allied Lukashenko regime has been accused of funnelling to the Polish border immigrants seeking entrance to the European Union in order to destabilize the region.
Tusk’s announcement in October that he planned to temporarily suspend the right to seek asylum by illegal immigrants was criticized by groups such as the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, which said the move was “short-sighted, unhumanitarian, and contrary to human rights.”
However, Tusk’s tough new approach quickly won support in Brussels.
“Russia and Belarus, or any other country, cannot be allowed to abuse our values, including the right to asylum, and to undermine our democracies,” the EU Council said in a statement in October.
Despite the tougher laws, Poland will continue to accept asylum applications, but only at official border crossings and giving priority to vulnerable individuals, including pregnant women, children, victims of violence in Belarus, and opposition activists, including Belarusians, according to a Polish deputy interior minister.
Poland’s new legislative package, which will now have to be approved by the lower house of parliament, also attempts to tackle what Tusk said was an “immigration industry” under the previous nationalist-populist Law and Justice government.
According to Tusk, “hundreds of thousands of visas were issued to people who pretended they would study at Polish universities”.
Tusk said that getting into a Polish university and paying its tuition fees has so far been the cheapest and easiest way for many to migrate to Poland.
“We are open to anyone from around the world who wants to study in Poland, but we are introducing a requirement that will prevent organizers of illegal migration from taking advantage of this,” Tusk said.
The Polish prime minister is heading to Brussels for a series of EU summits starting on Wednesday evening, and discussing tougher immigration laws in a broader European context is a key item on his agenda.
“Right after touchdown I will have a meeting with Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and the Dutch prime minister [Dick Schoof]”, Tusk said, adding that these leaders represent a group of countries actively working on the issue of asylum laws.
