IN 2023, Germany quietly reintroduced controls at its borders with Poland and the Czech Republic in an attempt to control illegal migration from outside the EU (mostly Middle Eastern, via Russia and Belorussia). Effective from this week, Poland is using troops to help its federal police to stop those migrants returning from Germany.
Thus the two largest members of the EU are now disobeying the EU’s core principle of free movement set out in the 1985 Schengen Agreement (of which Germany was a founding signatory but also signed by Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) which aimed gradually to abolish checks at the signatories’ common borders, facilitating the free movement of people, goods, and services. Within the area, EU residents do not need travel visas, or work visas, or leave to remain, or any change of citizenship or residency. The Schengen area was opened to Poland in 1999, and has been accessed by millions of Polish workers.
Germany and Poland are the two countries that claim to have benefited most from free movement (Germany mostly as a recipient of foreign-born labour, Poland mostly as a recipient of foreign-earned incomes). These are also the countries that have voted most vociferously to retain free movement (although in 2016 they were among the countries who temporarily reintroduced border controls to stem the flow of fake asylum-seekers from Syria, and in 2020 because of covid).
Both countries claim to be the rule-followers, in contrast to dissenting members such as Hungary (although Poland has often been criticised by the European Commission for supposed judicial violations).
Yet now Germany and Poland are both defying the principle of free movement — and blaming each other.
For years, Poland has complained about migrants shuttled into Poland by Belorussian authorities (and by Russian authorities into Belorussia). These were the flows that most concerned Germany in 2023. The Polish public is generally outraged at German reintroduction of border checks, not so much because the checks are inconvenient to legitimate traffic, but because Germany is protecting its own borders without helping Poland protect its borders. Until last week, the Polish government avoided the issue. National news media also tended to avoid the issue. Agitators took to social media, which is practically the only place to get honest exposure of migration in any Western country.
Germany and Poland are aligned against Russian aggression in Ukraine (although Poland was always leading the support for Ukraine within the EU, while Germany lagged). However, this German-Polish alignment doesn’t extend to migration from outside the EU.
German federal police are effectively acting in the same way as Belorussian federal police, facilitating the flow of non-EU migrants into Poland. Poland is being squeezed between similar Russian and German policies, even if Russian and German intents are dissimilar. Russia and Belorussia rationally prefer migrants to leave, given their general poverty, lack of education and lack of useful skills. Russia and Belorussia also like to destabilise Western neighbours. At the same time Germans are manifesting a long-overdue popular concern to reduce extra-EU migration, which is linked to a spike in crime and antisocial behaviour in general, and terrorism in particular.
Last week, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said he must ‘reduce the uncontrolled flows of migrants across the Polish-German border to a minimum’. The policy applies to the Polish border with Lithuania too. (Why Lithuania? Because Belorussia is shovelling migrants into Lithuania too.)
These premiers are EU-philes. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz got into domestic politics after the Brexit referendum (2016), with avowed opposition to Brexit, and allegiance to ever closer union. Donald Tusk was President of the European Council before he ran for Poland’s premiership.
It is ironic that the German and Polish premiers condemn Britain’s attempts to return illegal migrants to France, as well as Britain’s attempts to bribe/cajole/shame France into stopping illegal migrants from leaving France in the first place. Germany says just 3,488 migrants have been turned away from Poland. Yet more than 20,000 illegals crossed the English Channel in small boats during the first six months of 2025. This number excludes thousands who hide in shipping containers and overstay tourist visas and student visas.
What both countries and the EU need to wake up to is that free movement of people is viable only between states with common political and economic rules and norms, external border control, and welfare and benefits that apply to citizens and legitimate entrants only. This is the United States under Donald Trump.
The free movement of people is not viable where the common rules and norms are casually bent by the highest authority (as epitomised by the European Commission’s distribution of quotas of migrants to member states, and the Biden administration’s quiet shuttling of migrants into non-border states without informing them), the external borders are not controlled, and welfare and benefits are accessed as much by illegal migrants (indeed, more so) than by citizens.
This was the United States under Joe Biden. It is still the EU.
It is still even Britain which, despite Brexit, failed to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, and refuses to defy the European Court by returning migrants unilaterally to France, and continues to put up illegal migrants in hotels, feed them, entertain them, provide free healthcare and turn a blind eye to their crimes.
If you thought that Britain was moving in a more sensible direction, sadly it is not. Last week, the Ministry of Justice confirmed an increase in legal aid for immigrants contesting their right to remain in the UK. This is supposed to ‘clear the backlog’ of claims. It will not clear the backlog: it will pull more claimants, few of whom are denied, fewer still deported.
The free movement of peoples has been a disaster for European economic, cultural, political, and physical security. How many more ‘temporary’ reintroductions of internal border controls will European states go through before they get serious about external border control and internal welfare and benefits control?
