Recently, the Baltic nation of Poland has been experiencing a surge of illegal migration, especially in the capital city of Warsaw. In August alone, about 3,200 people attempted to illegally cross into Poland from the neighboring country of Belarus. A majority of these migrants are originally from Iraq or Afghanistan, but the Polish government has blamed this wave of migration on Belarus.
Poland, a part of the European Union(EU), accuses Belarus for using migrants as weapons in response to economic sanctions that the EU imposed against Belarus. The Polish government insists that Belarus’s authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, has been pushing migrants to their nation in order to destabilize the European Union. They believe that Lukashenko encourages refugees to come to Belarus on tourist visas and then sends them to neighboring Baltic states as retribution. In fact, Lithuania has been experiencing a similar wave of illegal migration where over 4,100 Iraqi migrants illegally entered the nation from Belarus.
In response to these migration troubles, Polish President, Andrzej Duda, has declared a state of emergency which imposes limits on outsiders in a border state area about 3 kilometers wide. It also marks the beginning of the installation of a tall barbed wire barrier on the Belarus-Poland border.
While some see this illegal migration as a national security threat, others see it as a human rights issue. Polish human rights activists have traveled to the border to attempt to help migrants who may be stuck, but officials have interfered and detained those who attempt to cross the border. One case that has gained the attention of these human rights parties is a group of over 30 Afghans that has been stuck between Belarusian and Polish guards for over three weeks. Both countries refuse to let the group cross the border and due to limited food supply and unpleasant weather conditions, some of the Afghans have begun to fall ill. When explaining the situation between Belarus and its bordering countries, this group of Afghan migrants has become the symbol of the budding tension and unfortunately, they are just a glimpse of the battle of migration in Eastern Europe.