Poland rethinks taking migrants
President backs closing door
WARSAW, Poland — Poland’s president Thursday threw his support behind a government decision to renege on a deal to accept thousands of migrants, citing security concerns raised by Tuesday’s attacks in Brussels.
The decision comes as many other countries in central and eastern Europe have protested — or, like Hungary and Slovakia, sued over — the European Union’s plan to divide up some 120,000 refugees among member countries.
The plan is part of efforts to help alleviate Europe’s migrant crisis, which has seen hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa arrive on the continent in recent months.
Opponents of the migration have warned that extremists could slip in along with the flood of refugees.
However, the suicide bombers in the attacks in Brussels, brothers Ibrahim and Khalid El Bakraoui, were Belgian-born.
It was unclear if Poland’s decision would negatively affect a deal that European leaders struck last week with Turkey that is aimed at limiting the influx of migrants to Europe and better ensuring that those who arrive are entitled to asylum because of danger in their countries, and are not people looking only for better economic opportunities.
Poland’s conservative, anti-migrant government had grudgingly affirmed the previous government’s commitment to take in 7,000 refugees from Syria and Eritrea over the next two years. At the same time, sensing general uncertainty about receiving migrants into a mostly homogeneous nation, the officials stressed that permission to settle there would be preceded by meticulous security and identity checks.
But since the Brussels attacks, Prime Minister Beata Szydlo said “I see no possibility for migrants to come to Poland now.”
On Thursday, the spokesman for Polish President Andrzej Duda confirmed that decision and said Europe has failed to build an efficient system of checking new arrivals to make sure they don’t pose security risks.
“The prime minister is right when she says that without an efficient system of hot spots … no country, neither Poland, nor Spain or Germany or Austria is able to fully control this problem,” said spokesman Marek Magierowski.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said decisions about who should be let in should be made by each country, not by the European Union, which he accuses of “stealthily” seeking to expand its powers at the expense of national sovereignty.
The Czech Republic has committed to receive some 2,800 migrants.
Poland has not been on the route that migrants take from Turkey to Greece and then through the Balkans to western Europe, but it is especially focused on security ahead of two major international events it will host in July: a NATO summit and Pope Francis’ meeting with hundreds of thousands of Catholic youths.
On Thursday, the interior minister and the coordinator of security services presented draft legislation expected to take effect in May that will allow for close surveillance, 14-day detentions and summary expulsions of foreigners suspected of being threats to security. Poland’s borders could be closed temporarily, and mass events canceled in case of a threat, Interior Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said.