Wednesday, November 03, 2021
Despite the increase in asylum seekers
GdP against controls at the Polish border
In the past few months, the number of people entering Germany from Poland without permission has risen sharply. However, the police union does not consider the introduction of border controls to be necessary. Instead, one should support the border guards on the Polish-Belarusian border.
The Police Union (GdP) considers controls at the border with Poland to be unnecessary despite the significantly increased number of unauthorized entries by asylum seekers there. “The current migration situation is serious, but far from the situation as we experienced it in the context of mass migration in 2015. Thus, at the moment there is no reason at all to introduce temporary border controls,” said the GdP chairman for the concerns of the Federal Police, Andreas Roßkopf.
With 120 to 280 unauthorized migrants entering the entire border with Poland every day, one is still in an area in which the high level of interference with EU freedom of travel cannot be justified with border controls, he added. Roßkopf had a conversation this week with the acting Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer and with Dagmar Busch, the head of the department for affairs of the Federal Police in the ministry, about the situation on the German-Polish border.
The entry of asylum seekers who come to Poland by plane via Belarus and from there, the majority of them travel on to Germany, has increased sharply in recent months. Last weekend alone, the federal police found 597 unauthorized people who had previously been in Belarus in the border area with Poland. Most of them came from Iraq, Syria, Iran and Afghanistan.
The right measures to curb the current migration situation are the strengthening of internal border searches and support for the Polish border guards on the Polish-Belarusian border by forces from the European border protection agency Frontex, said Roßkopf. Sanctions and measures by the European Union against Belarus and the airlines that bring migrants to Belarus are also necessary.
In response to EU sanctions, the Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko declared in the spring that he would no longer stop migrants heading for the European Union. The EU accuses him of literally smuggling people from poor regions and crisis areas. Most recently, they landed in Minsk on flights from Russia, Syria, Lebanon, Dubai and Turkey.