Poland to tighten border controls amid growing tension over irregular crossings
The decision, made after a government meeting with the Polish border guard on Tuesday, comes in response to growing domestic political pressure and far-right backed protests at Poland's border crossings with Germany over the weekend.
In remarks at the beginning of the weekly cabinet meeting, Tusk blamed Germany for the move, accusing it of a policy shift resulting in 'effectively refusing entry … to migrants who are heading to Germany to apply for asylum or other forms of status'.
'The way operations are conducted at the Polish-German border has clearly changed over the past month,' he said.
The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, made a more hardline migration policy a pillar of his election campaign earlier this year. After he took office in May, Germany stationed more police at the border and said some people trying to enter the country would be turned away.
Even before that, Merz's predecessor in February extended by six months the temporary border checks Germany had imposed on its frontiers last autumn, as it attempted to cut the number of people arriving in the country.
Tusk argued that the recent policy shift had placed undue pressure on Poland to accept individuals denied entry at the German border.
'With no border checks on the Polish side, it becomes difficult to determine whether those being returned or redirected to Poland should be sent there,' he said.
Tusk added that he had spoken 'several times' with Merz, warning him that Poland's 'patient stance … was wearing thin'.
'We have been defenders of the Schengen area [the EU's visa-free travel zone] and remain advocates of a Europe with open borders and unrestricted movement. However, such a system requires the same, symmetrical commitment from all neighbouring countries,' he said.
'Therefore, the temporary reinstatement of border controls on the Polish-German border is necessary to reduce, to the minimum, the uncontrolled flow of migrants crossing … the border.'
According to the EU, member states are allowed to temporarily reintroduce border controls in cases of a serious threat, such as internal security. It says border controls should be applied as a last resort in exceptional situations, and must be limited in time.
In a pointed warning to Merz, Tusk on Tuesday said that if the German government extended one-sided border controls in September, Poland would retaliate with a similar move. 'The time when Poland would not respond appropriately to such actions has definitively come to an end,' he added.
Debate over migration in Poland has turned increasingly heated in recent weeks, with far-right activists starting to organise patrols along the border with Germany.
The move to introduce temporary border controls with Lithuania was understood to be linked to the German policy change.
Sign up to This is Europe
The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment
after newsletter promotion
Tusk said that with the heavily militarised Polish-Belarusian border closed to irregular migration, other neighbouring countries were now being used to explore alternative routes into the Schengen area through the Baltics.
As a result, he said, 'the stream of illegal migration, orchestrated by Russia and Belarus, continues to flow through Belarus, Latvia, and Lithuania – and Poland, after all, has an open border with Lithuania'.
Merz was asked about Poland's growing criticism during a joint press conference with the prime minister of Luxembourg.
Speaking minutes before Tusk announced Poland's decision, Merz said he was aware of Polish concerns and had repeatedly spoken with the Polish prime minister in recent days.
But he insisted that there were 'no returns from Germany to Poland of asylum seekers who had already arrived in Germany'.
Merz said the two countries 'have a common problem that we want to solve together'.
He added: 'We naturally want to preserve the Schengen area, but freedom of movement in the Schengen area will only work in the long term if it is not abused by those who promote irregular migration, in particular by smuggling migrants.'
Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
8 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Will the French keep slashing boats of people smugglers? Non! Starmer left ‘humiliated' after continental cops revealed that they will not routinely use tactic to stop people smugglers
SIr Keir Starmer was left 'humiliated' after French police revealed that they will not routinely slash the boats of people smugglers as they set off to cross Channel. Only two days ago, No 10 hailed footage showing French officers ripping open a dinghy in shallow waters as a 'significant moment' in the bid to smash the people-smuggling gangs. But last night a senior source working for the Gendarme unit responsible – the Compagnie de Marche – made clear it would 'by no means' be a regular tactic. The source told The Mail on Sunday: 'The slashing of boats will not become routine.' He added: 'It was a pragmatic move ultimately aimed at saving lives. We saw the boat was dangerously overcrowded and liable to sink, and so took the decision to rescue everybody on board. 'This is exactly what happened – nobody was hurt, and the very dangerous boat was confiscated. 'This was by no means a change in tactics.' Embarrassingly for the Prime Minister, it comes just days before French president Emmanuel Macron arrives in the UK for a state visit. Cops were shown slashing the dinghy with knives in their latest attempt to foil migrants and refugees from making the perilous crossing Only yesterday the PM spoke to Mr Macron and raised hopes of making 'good progress' on migration and other priorities. Last night the Tories seized on what they saw as Downing Street's discomfort. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: 'Only two days ago, No 10 was claiming this as a huge victory. But now they have been humiliated as the new tactic turned out to be a one-off.' He added: 'The French appear to have no intention of routinely stopping these boats despite being paid nearly half a billion pounds of British taxpayers' money. 'Illegal migration continues to flood into the UK, but Labour has lost control of our borders and has no answers.' On Friday, No 10 welcomed video footage showing a French 'gendarme' destroying an inflatable dinghy off a beach south of Boulogne-sur-Mer. The flimsy craft was packed with migrants, who were forced to abandon their crossing as it collapsed into the water. Downing Street said that it was a 'significant moment' that could have 'a major impact on shutting down the tactics these gangs use'. However, unlike regular police in France, gendarmes are military personnel known for more robust tactics than their counterparts in other law and order units. And a National Police spokesman said that regular officers would 'continue to follow strict rules that bar them from going into the sea' in case they put lives at risk. It follows police trade unionists arguing that interfering with UK-bound migrants in the English Channel could 'lead to more deaths.' A senior source at Alliance – the largest police union in the country – said: 'If there are 80 people on an overcrowded boat, including women and children, then it is extremely dangerous to try to stop them. 'People can fall in the water, while others resist arrest – the potential for disaster, including further deaths, is immense. 'Turning us into sea police in this manner is not the way forward.' It comes as more than 500 people arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel on Friday. Some 517 people came on eight boats, taking the annual total to 21,117, according to news agency PA. There have been 17 deaths in 2025 alone on the cross-Channel migration route, mainly because of flimsy dinghies overturning or deflating, often very close to the shore. Procedural changes now being considered in France will instead focus on the use of patrol boats at sea to intercept so-called 'taxi-boats'. These are the people-smuggling boats that enter the sea empty from inland waterways and attempt to pick up migrants from the beach. A French interior ministry source told The MoS: 'Preventing a taxi boat with one or two people smugglers on board from picking up scores of migrants will be much safer than approaching a boat that is already overcrowded.' Last night a Home Office source said: 'We obviously welcome any action French counterparts are able to do. We want to see an end to these dangerous channel crossing. 'These criminal gangs packing more people into boats are a total disgrace.'
Times
8 hours ago
- Times
Chess will never be ruled by a queen
The battle of the sexes, or, to be more precise, the battle over sex, has broken out in the oldest of all war games, chess. In Germany, Nora Heidemann, 17, identifying and officially categorised as female but born a boy, won the national girls' under-18 tournament. The German Chess Youth organisation acclaimed Heidemann's result: 'Congratulations on this great performance!' The head of the German commission for women's chess, Nadja Jussupow, was less thrilled. As the Times reported last week, she claimed that more trans women were entering women's chess tournaments since the introduction last year of Germany's Self-Determination Act: 'They merely declared themselves to be women.' Jussupow also claimed to have spoken to many female players who said they would stop competing if it continued. She meant, presumably, in women-only events, since the great majority of tournaments are 'open' ones, in which men and women compete together. They are invariably won by men. Which is, in a way, her point: 'The difference is particularly clear at the top: the men's national team, for example, plays two classes higher than the women's team.' Put more clearly: China's Hou Yifan, far and away the world's strongest female chess player (so much so that she relinquished the women's world championship she first won at the age of 16, as she had nothing left to prove in that context), is ranked 96th in the world, on the Elo rating system, behind 95 men. When the world chess governing body, FIDE, said in December 2023 it would not permit trans women to play in women's events under its auspices — basically, the women's world championship — pending a review of the matter, it declared, in response to critics: 'Of course men and women are equally intellectually capable. However, in chess as a sport other factors like physical endurance may play a role.' This was widely ridiculed, notably by the Labour MP Angela Eagle, a joint winner of the 1976 British girls' under-18 chess championship: 'There is no physical advantage in chess unless you believe that men are inherently more able to play than women. I spent my chess career being told women's brains were smaller than men's and we shouldn't even be playing.' This may well have been the unpleasant ambience when Eagle was competing. But the idea of male physical endurance being of no relevance to this mind sport is itself regarded as ignorant by those women who have competed at the highest level. One of them, Alexandra Kosteniuk, wrote, in exasperation: 'It's almost impossible to explain to non-chess-players how physically demanding the game is, and how hard, physically and psychologically, it is to compete in world championship-level competition.' When, 11 years ago, I played a game against Hou (and was ground down remorselessly in 45 moves) I asked her why women were outperformed so widely by men at the highest level. 'There is a physical side. In chess sometimes you play for seven to eight hours.' She added that 'based on history, I don't see any chance' of a woman becoming the world's strongest player. So, no real-world version of the Netflix drama The Queen's Gambit. In fact, at 14, Hou was the world's highest-ranked player of her age, of either sex. The same had been true of the astonishing Judit Polgar, who became a grandmaster at the age of 15, beating the record of the late Bobby Fischer. Polgar, the only woman ever to have entered the world's top 10 — in 1996 — told me it was only social and cultural factors that stood in the way of women becoming as good as the men at the highest level. Yet a decline in the ranking of females versus males in chess does seem to occur with the onset of puberty and, on the male side of the divide, the effects of testosterone. Those effects are enormous in physical sport, which is why some national sporting bodies' refusal to recognise this, allowing trans women to compete in female weightlifting competitions, swimming or cycling, for example, aroused justifiable public bewilderment — and equally justifiable anger on the part of female competitors who saw their chances blighted by a demented ideology that denied the reality of male biological advantage. But chess — really? If so, it may be analogous, in some way, to a phenomenon in the distribution of IQ: although the male and female averages are the same, males are overrepresented at the very bottom and the very top of the range. To put it crudely, we men provide more idiots and more geniuses. But chess skill is not a pure measure of intelligence: I have met enough chess grandmasters to know that. And I have a small personal example: my stepfather, Sir Alfred Ayer, then Wykeham professor of logic at New College, Oxford, who at the precocious age of 25 produced the seminal book Language, Truth and Logic, was an avid chess-player. But, as a dopey teenager, I would beat him every time we played. The idea that the complete absence of women at the very top of the world chess rankings is a cultural rather than biological phenomenon has frequently been justified by the point that among those registered as players, and at a recreational level, men greatly outnumber women. Therefore, it is said, this is a participation effect — akin to the fact that China will produce many more Olympic gold medallists than Iceland, because their vastly higher number of athletes enhances the probability of having more with extreme talent. So, get more women playing chess, and, over time, they will match men at the very top. That would be wonderful to see, but, alas, the argument was demolished by Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist and the author of T: The Story of Testosterone. She pointed out: 'Like chess, Scrabble uses a version of the Elo rating system. But unlike in the chess world, women dominate the recreational ranks of Scrabble, accounting for about 85 per cent of all recreational players. Even at the competitive level, women generally outnumber men … so if the participation rate hypothesis were correct in this context, then women should be dominating the elite Scrabble ranks. But they're not. Instead, men dominate Scrabble's upper tiers, as they do in chess. And the same goes for bridge.' Hooven's conclusion is that men are more disposed to the intense and passionate obsessiveness, shutting out all external activities and interests, required to become the world's best over the confines of the 64 squares. Or, as the late Dutch grandmaster Jan Hein Donner put it: 'What is going on in their heads is narcissistic self-gratification with a minimum of objective reality, a wordless snuffling and scrabbling in a bottomless pit.' If women are, for biological reasons, less able to lead such a life, the rest follows.
Telegraph
11 hours ago
- Telegraph
Slash welfare for migrants to save the taxpayer
After a year in office, the travails of Sir Keir Starmer's Government can be summarised neatly in two words: 'benefits' and 'migration'. The British state has proven unable to tackle either, and the associated costs are proving ruinous, with Chancellor Rachel Reeves now looking at further tax rises as a result of Labour's welfare U-turn. These issues, too, are compounding one another. Rising worklessness feeds demand for migration even as Britain's apparent desire to act as the world's welfare state aids in fuelling the supply. With his half-hearted attempt at addressing one of these issues shredded by militant Left-wing backbenchers, Sir Keir now appears utterly devoid of ideas for addressing either. The Conservative Party is not, and is now calling on the Government to bar non-citizens from claiming the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and sickness top-ups to Universal Credit, with an exemption for those EU citizens given special status under the Brexit deal. The savings could prove to be substantial, with recent figures showing that the cost of benefits claims by households with at least one foreign national have doubled in recent years to nearly £1 billion a month. The overall bill for PIP, and its predecessor the Disability Living Allowance, is set to reach £28 billion a year by 2028-29. With the British state under increasing fiscal strain, and taxpayers in turn shouldering an ever greater burden for the maintenance of the welfare state, it is evident to all but the Labour backbenches that something must be done to rein in eligibility. Some of these measures should target the criteria through which conditions become eligible for payment – some 122,855 people were receiving enhanced PIP mobility payments in March for mixed anxiety and depressive disorders, figures which are hard to credit as a legitimate reflection of need – but others should look to reassert the idea that the welfare state is for the welfare of Britain and not the wider world. If they do not, we will find that we implicitly accept the inexorable growth of the state, and its demands on those generous enough to work to fund it. It is quite clear which direction Sir Keir's government is heading in, with Labour signing Britain up to a United Nations pact which makes 42 references to taxation, including specific mentions of 'high-net-worth individuals' and 'progressive tax systems'. While not a binding commitment on the behalf of this country, it is a strong indicator of where this Government's instincts lie – and where, come the Autumn Budget, the blow to taxpayers is likely to fall. The Conservatives deserve credit for being willing to push for a viable alternative.
