The new Eastern border of Schengen area and the irregular immigration into and from Poland (ARI)

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the transformation of the economic and political structure of the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region gave rise to new migration trends, especially in Poland. Over the past 17 years Poland has become the host and crossing country for thousand of immigrants –both legal and illegal– and refugees. The biggest national groups of non-EU immigrants in the Central European countries come from their eastern neighbourhood –Russia, Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus– and from Asia –Vietnam and Armenia–.

Poland has been forced to design a stricter migratory regime, first for its accession to the EU and, secondly, for entering the Schengen area. Since December 2007 Poland’s eastern frontier (stretching across 1,200 kilometres from the Baltic to the Carpathians) has become one of the few points in Europe at which it is possible to control human spatial mobility on the east-west axis.

The immediate victims of the enlarged Schengen space were its closest eastern neighbours, whose international mobility has been stopped by the implementation of a visa regime. On the other hand, there has been a sharp increase in the number of crossings of Poland’s western borders by illegal migrants from other regions –previously living in CEE countries–. The question is how to make the EU’s external borders as friendly as possible for legal migration and as tight as possible for illegal migrants.