WARSAW — Poland is ready to help alleviate the migration crisis, but opposes quotas set by Brussels and insists that Europe do a better job of separating true asylum seekers from those moving for economic reasons, the country’s deputy foreign minister told POLITICO.
“We do not think that any kind of automatic system is part of the solution,” Rafał Trzaskowski said. “An automatic system will work as a pull factor, because many migrants will think that the European Union is prepared to take care of whatever influx is coming their way.”
Poland, along with most other central European countries, strongly opposed the automatic allocation of refugees suggested earlier this summer by Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission.
Leaders of the four-member Visegrad Group — Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia — met on Friday, announcing afterwards that they would only accept voluntary settlement schemes. “Any proposal leading to introduction of mandatory and permanent quota for solidarity measures would be unacceptable,” they said in a joint statement.
Hungary, which has seen as many as 120,000 people arrive from Serbia in the first half of this year, and thousands more since then, has emerged as a flash point. But there is concern that if it succeeds in stemming the rush of refugees with its new border fence, migrants will simply shift and start to head to western Europe through other central European countries including Poland.
Warsaw is also worried that if the situation deteriorates in neighboring Ukraine, it could be forced to grant asylum to the 300,000 Ukrainians already working in Poland.
The key issue for Warsaw is that the EU develops a better and faster system of determining who has a legitimate claim to asylum and swiftly returning those who don’t.
“We have a moral obligation to help with refugees, but we aren’t able to accept economic migrants,” Ewa Kopacz, the Polish prime minister, said earlier this week.
“We are ready to help but first let’s implement the [original EU] plan” —Rafał Trzaskowski.
Trzaskowski mentioned the example of Spain, which saw a steep fall in the number of people arriving in the Canary Islands after striking a deal with African countries that allowed the Spanish to deport economic migrants within eight hours of their arrival.
“We have to make a list of safe countries to which people are going to be sent back, and then we can focus on refugees. I think that would lessen the pressure on our borders,” he said.
Poland has come under fierce diplomatic pressure for its less-than-enthusiastic response to help with the refugee crisis. After helping block Juncker’s quota idea, the country ended up accepting 2,000 refugee applicants instead of the 4,000 suggested by Brussels.
Now, even that is not enough, with the Commission looking at allocating an additional 160,000 refugees on top of the 60,000 decided on earlier this summer.
“We are ready to help but first let’s implement the [original] plan,” Trzaskowski said. “It’s really strange that we have a deal and then a month later we say we need something five times more radical before we’ve even tried to implement the deal and see if it works.”
Poland’s response has been hampered by a campaign ahead of October 25 parliamentary elections which the ruling Civic Platform looks set to lose to the right-wing Law and Justice party
“The fall election campaign is not the perfect time to start a mature discussion about immigration policy that we need to have in Poland,” he admitted.
Poland is a largely mono-ethnic society, a result of the loss of most of the country’s Jews during World War II, and the removal of millions of ethnic Germans after the fighting ended. As with the rest of central Europe, the region has little experience of the modern migrations that have transformed western Europe.
However, Poles do remember the past, when millions of people were deported after the country’s borders were shifted hundreds of kilometers to the west after the war. Trzaskowski recalled that members of his own family sought refuge in Denmark and Canada after the military crackdown on the Solidarity movement in the early 1980s. Today, about two million Poles have moved to Western Europe in search of higher pay and better jobs after the country joined the EU in 2004.
Trzaskowski acknowledged that there hasn’t been much of an effort to educate the public about the plight of refugees. However, the Roman Catholic Church has entered the fray, with Wojciech Polak, the primate of Poland, tweeting: “We are called on to recognize the face of Christ in the refugees.”
The pressure on Poland to accept more refugees is likely to be only temporary because the vast majority who are settled there will in all likelihood swiftly head to wealthier western Europe, Trzaskowski said.
He recalled a 2012 resettlement scheme that would have seen Poland take 50 African refugees from Malta. Only six came, of whom five quickly moved on to Germany.
“How are you going to make those migrants choose Poland and stay in Poland?” he asked.
Listen to the interview with Trzaskowski:
This article has been updated to include the concluding statement from the Visegrad Group summit