The German government has requested a total of 1,878 migrants, including those who have “abused the asylum procedure,” be transferred to Poland according to a Twitter post by Straż Graniczna, the border agency of Poland. The agency noted that a total of 2,182 migrants had been transferred to Poland from countries across the European Union so far this year.
The number contrasts to the entirety of 2022, in which 848 migrants were transferred from European Union countries to Poland, 628 of them from neighbouring Germany, although a total of 3,929 applications were made that year.
The migrants are sent back to Poland under the European Union’s Dublin Agreement which states that migrants must remain in the first country where they applied for asylum and cannot move to another country as their asylum claim is being processed to file another asylum claim in that country.
Tens of thousands of migrants have crossed into Germany from Poland in recent years, particularly in 2021 when thousands of migrants entered Poland from Belarus, with over 11,000 estimated to have made their way through the country to Germany that year.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko was accused of engaging in “hybrid warfare” by the British think tank Chatham House as some reports claimed that the Belarusian authorities were marching migrants across the Polish border at gunpoint.
Since 2021, the number of illegal migrants crossing into Poland and other European Union member states that border Belarus has substantially decreased. The European Union border agency Frontex noted that in the first four months of 2023, just 1,561 illegal migrants had crossed into the EU along the eastern land border, down 20% from the same period last year.
While illegal migration into Germany from Poland has slowed substantially from the eastern land border migration route, Germany saw a substantial influx of migrants last year due to increased activity across the Western Balkan route and saw more arrivals than any year since the height of the migration crisis in 2015 and 2016.
Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees reported in January that the country had seen 217,774 first-time asylum applications in 2022, which amounted to an increase of 46.9% compared with the prior year.
As Germany’s asylum system had already been strained by the influx of Ukrainian refugees fleeing their country’s conflict with Russia, many German regions complained about a lack of space to house and take care of new illegal arrivals last year, with just four of the 16 German states claiming to have any room for new migrants at all in September.
Last year, just 4,158 migrants were deported from Germany under the Dublin Agreement, despite the government requesting the deportation of 68,709 illegals overall. According to a report from the German tabloid Bild in January, Germany has only successfully managed to send back 46,838 migrants since 2014, out of 444,849 requests.
Germany’s request comes as Poland has outright rejected the European Union’s upcoming migration pact which seeks to redistribute migrants across the political bloc.
Polish Home Affairs Minister Mariusz Kamiński confirmed his government’s stance on the new pact saying last month, “There is no and there will be no consent to the forced relocation of migrants to Poland.”
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki slammed the new pact, which is expected to be finalised by the end of June, highlighting a provision he claimed would lead countries to be forced to pay €22,000 for each migrant they reject under the scheme, though no official figure is mentioned in the initial draft legislation.
Polish MEP Kosma Złotowski also told The European Conservative earlier this month that Poland was not interested in taking in more illegal immigrants at a time the government was helping “real war refugees” fleeing the conflict in Ukraine.
