Katarzyna Przyborska: The government's migration strategy amazed me. It has 36 pages, no proposal for solutions, sounds alternatively like a political, to the point of a populist manifesto. The strategy was to be based on a study from investigation commissioned by Minister Duszczyk, who was developed by the Polish Academy of Sciences. Do you see any signs of this survey in strategy?
Witold Klaus: There are inactive crumbs, due to the fact that in our work there are elements that besides talk about expanding control over certain processes. Our study and this government paper do not meet. So I feel, in plain terms, cheated.
What was your study?
We asked experts working in very many sectors and having Contact with immigrantswhere they see problems erstwhile it comes to their arrival, stay and possibly expulsion. It's actually a image of what people think and think differently. Sometimes we see cohesion and sometimes a discrepancy in the views of social organisations, employers and local governments.
Is your study what the ministry was talking about?
The ministry expected us to have a very simple picture, dry data taken from the context, essential to know what people's views are from. For example, if we talk about a barrier on the border, we can collect answers whether the barrier likes it or not, but it is besides crucial what its past was and how its presence is related to Polish global obligations.
What would be the applicable outline of specified a deeper context?
For example, we asked whether people who cross the Polish-Belarusian border and are checked by our authorities should have access to the aid of representatives. Three-quarters of those working in the government administration said no.
But they're entitled to attorneys.
We could halt there, but we are asked to show and callback a comment on the Code of Administrative Procedure and a quote from 1 of the judgments of the ultimate Administrative Court, which shows explicitly that the government administration has no right to restrict the access of attorneys and attorneys to administrative proceedings, due to the fact that this is 1 of the rights of the party. That's the context.
I don't think the strategist had the time and the desire to enter nuances. The paper looks like a proceeding for populists, presents frequently declared fears and ensures that the government will be determined.
It's not a strategy, but it's a message to conservative voters: see how tough we are. This. populist manifestoNot a strategy. He doesn't draw from our research, he doesn't consider, he doesn't nuance. It is, as you say, a treatise for populists, but it is not known why it is created, due to the fact that it is fundamentally detached from reality.
What do you mean?
We have about 2.5 million people with experience of migration in Poland, and this strategy does not show what we want to do with them, does not go beyond the general slogan that they are to obey the law and learn Polish. The government adopted this strategy without asking anyone who knows how to do it.
Ukrainians were allowed access to the labour marketplace and Poland has over 1% of GDP. The experience of Ukrainian refugees besides shows that integration is easier erstwhile social networks exist. It was thanks to them that exile camps were not created in Poland.
Meanwhile, this paper says only control, security, danger, danger, aliens will come and do something to us. It is xenophobic in its tone, inferior and more vicious in rhetoric than the strategy prepared by the Government of Law and Justice in 2019.
Or is it just a performance? Does Minister Duszczyk not knock on the back door of the Polish Academy of Sciences and does not say: of course, we will usage your work, but we request to make specified a gesture, specified a manifesto that the Law and Justices do not shout that we want to flood Poland with Islamists, and in fact we will build solid institutions that will deal with migration seriously.
Even if this could possibly be the case, it is not my consent as a Pole, as a individual from the technological community. We cannot deceive public opinion, print government documents, and then do something completely different. That's not how the state works. Even if the Minister had specified an idea, I believe that specified action would be profoundly unfair to all of us.
If this government strategy had been implemented, what predictable effects would it have?
We have been watching Poland for a long time. We would besides close Poland here from people who come to Poland to learn and work.
But the strategy assumes that as a consequence of increased control, there will come non-random people, but real students, educated people and needed workers.
We would very much like different things, only they most likely won't happen due to the fact that migration is simply a process that is hard to control. And Poland is not as attractive a country as it seems to us, for those whose government would like – that is, highly skilled people from the global North. But I would say, in my opinion, that this strategy will not be implemented.
Why?
Through strong opposition from various actors: employers, NGOs. It's very easy to talk about control, but individual has to control it.
The strategy assumes digital control. It will be through digital applications that Poland will check whether the individual is definitely the 1 he claims to be. After all, this is simply a government consequence to the corruption of visa-trading officials shown by NIK.
There are many empty passwords in the strategy. Just due to the fact that we're going to have any kind of digitized strategy doesn't mean anything's gonna change. Should we quit consuls and give AI visa assessments?
If the consuls are susceptible to corruption...
This is unreal.
So we would gotta educate officials – responsible, honest. Is this real?
We can besides go the another way: do not grant entry visas, cut them by 80% and reduce the number of officials. But is that truly what this is about? And will this action aid the improvement of our country?
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And the another thing is the distrust that comes from a strategy that's controlled. If we fishy individual all the time, he responds to distrust, which means that no coherent society can be built. And it is said that the government is trying to do so, as it promises in strategy.
So 1 component of the strategy is already sabotaging the other? With specified distrust and control, integration cannot succeed?
These are not good conditions for integration, a deficiency of trust will consequence in the closure of both sides, each other.
That is the biggest threat to the safety of the state and the safety of our society in the long term. That's what happened in France. There have besides been deep structural exclusions of people, not any migrants (which politicians and politicians repeat to us), but people who have had French citizenship for years but do not feel part of this society due to the fact that society does not think they are part of it due to the fact that it is afraid of them. The rhetoric of a government strategy, full of accusations and mistrust, is simply a step towards a French script. So again, the government is doing what it would like to avoid.
Poland continues to trade intensively with Belarus, through which goods, bypassing sanctions, go to Russia. Shouldn't that be the domain of the state: diplomatic pressure, sanctions against a country that destabilizes the border alternatively than the abuse of migrants themselves?
That's right. I do not know if you have pointed out that Ursula von der Leyen and the European Commission sent a plan to the leaders and leaders of the associate States with 10 points on Monday, 14 October. 1 of them is precisely this: we should focus on the countries, on diplomatic action, to effort any kind of migration to channel, sometimes to slow down, but – and what the European Commission paper besides mentions, albeit marginally – these efforts will only be effective if we make conditions for legal migration, that is, we will increase the number of visas issued, for example. due to the fact that if we're closing down legal migration channels, we're condemning ourselves to smuggling. Poland wants to choose the 3rd way and close everything, and naively hopes that specified a strategy will succeed.
But we don't want them coming at all, legally or illegally. The KO voters and even the Left have a imagination of Poland for Poles in 10 years.
We may want to, and the process has already begun, as has the climate. If people feel desperate, they must flee due to the fact that they cannot live at home, they will take all kinds of migration risks. We've been through this ourselves. More than a million people left Poland in the 1980s.
And they were frequently problematic for the countries that took them.
Because migrations can be problematic. Especially if people arrive in an emergency erstwhile the state is unprepared for their party. But we do not have much forced immigration at all, it is estimated that at the Polish-Belarusian border there are at most 10 1000 people per year. And remember, against fences and troops, any of them cross that line. At the same time, we have a million people who fled the war from Ukraine and we are moving on to the agenda.
Why?
Because we're racist, although we don't want to admit it ourselves. But what else can we call it if we think we shouldn't let the white ones in? I can't explain it to myself.
How do you imagine in Polish society the effect of specified a migration strategy and specified training of services, which is now taking place at the border with Belarus, in the form of force against civilians?
For me, what could happen to us is the further improvement of these alleged civic patrols.
You mean the fascism of social life?
Yeah, and that's precisely where we're going. But I really, if I can comfort you, I firmly believe that this government strategy will never come true.
That he would fall for Polish failure?
Yeah, connected to the reluctance to change. That's what past teaches.
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Witold Klaus is simply a habilitated doctor, prof. of the Institute of Legal Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, co-chair of the Migration Consortium.
