The Immigration Lesson Liberals Don't Want to Face
Poland is laying down a playbook other countries may be forced to follow.
In recent years, no issue has posed as much of a problem for Western liberals as immigration. Backlash to immigrants was key to Trump’s two victories, the vote for Brexit in the UK, and much of the right-wing surge that has remade European politics. By and large, the Western establishment has moved away from the approach of leaders like Angela Merkel and Joe Biden, who allowed large numbers of migrants and refugees into their countries and paid a tremendous political price for doing so. In the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, leaders from the political mainstream have started responding to popular pressure by restricting immigration.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in Poland, where the promises of European cooperation, internationalism, and progress remain strong—but where the threat posed by irregular migration has caused severe political backlash. Poland’s government—a centrist coalition led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk—has navigated the awkward position of being liberals in government at an illiberal hour. They have explicitly suspended the right to asylum on one of Poland’s borders and found themselves testing the limits of European and international law.
At the same time, they have emphasized the need to protect vulnerable groups, save migrant lives, and integrate refugees coming from nearby Ukraine. Poland’s liberals are convinced that they have found a more durable and pragmatic way to preserve humanitarian ideals in a changed political reality. They have critics on right and left—but the indications are that Poland’s government is laying down a playbook that other Western nations will soon be forced to follow.
The West learned several hard lessons from the experience of World War II: that ethnic prejudice could result in genocide; that hard-heartedness towards refugees could be a death sentence; and that international rules were needed to protect the dignity of individuals. New moral commitments were made concrete by the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights and the 1951 Refugee Convention. In Europe, the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) became enforcers of these pledges.
Poland’s history is an emblem for the 20th century events which gave rise to international law. The country was victimized by the worst Nazi abuses, ruled by communists for decades, and joined the EU and NATO hoping to become like the liberal democracies of Western Europe. In Polish politics, you can still hear the optimistic tune of 1989: liberals promise a future defined by economic growth, partnership with the West, and participation in the liberal international order.
Yet aversion to migration is stronger in Poland than almost anywhere in the West. As recently as 2015, Poland was 99% white and 98% ethnically Polish. That year, a liberal government proposed accepting a few thousand Syrians during the European migrant crisis. They were booted from power and replaced by the populist-right Law and Justice Party (PiS). Poland is the largest European country never to have had colonies; many Poles feel no historical obligation to receive non-Western refugees. Poland is also not used to pluralism: it is 90% Catholic, and the legacy of communism has meant class divisions are less salient than in Western Europe.
In 2021, a slow drip of immigration gave way to crisis. In August of that year, Belarussian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko began offering “tourist” visas to huge numbers of African and Middle Eastern migrants, allowing them to enter Belarus, before forcing them to cross the Polish border. Lukashenko wanted to push “migrants and drugs” on EU member states that had opposed his domestic political crackdown. Suddenly, tens of thousands of migrants with no connection to Poland were pouring over the border, which at that time had no physical barrier and was lightly patrolled. Lukashenko hoped to exploit Poland’s need to comply with EU and international humanitarian law to destabilize the country’s politics.
In the initial wave of crossings, many vulnerable families crossed over from Belarus. But some of the migrants were single young men who were prone to fighting with border guards. Poland’s PiS government implemented a policy of automatically returning captured migrants to Belarus—a method of return known as “pushbacks.” Human rights advocates denounced the policy as a violation of the principle of non-refoulement, the international legal stipulation that refugees may not be returned to a country in which they are in serious danger. Initially, Poland’s liberals joined the condemnations.
But the government’s toughness proved popular: two-thirds of Poles feared the border situation would spiral into war and large majorities opposed accepting the crossers as refugees. Poland erected a border wall; Belarus provided migrants with ladders and wire cutters. The crossings continued. So did the pushbacks.
Six months later, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Millions fled, and many headed for Poland, which already had a comparatively well-established Ukrainian community and a language similar to Ukrainian. Poland accepted over a million refugees in the first months of the war, and passed laws to immediately give them the same access to schooling, social benefits, and healthcare as Poland’s own 40 million citizens. The PiS government, local authorities, and civil society mobilized en masse, earning Poland praise all over the West. In ten days, Poland accepted nearly as many refugees as the entire European continent had in 2015. While civil society has shown signs of fatigue, there have been few large-scale social problems even though Ukrainians now comprise 7% of Poland’s population.
Activists decried the striking disparity in attitudes towards the different groups of refugees: tens of thousands were being rejected and pushed back into Belarus, millions let in from Ukraine. Yet these steps were broadly popular: Poland’s animosity towards Russia, the sense of control over the Polish-Ukrainian border, and the similarity of Polish and Ukrainian language and culture made acceptance socially possible where it had not been for those coming from Belarus.
If anything, Russia’s invasion also had the effect of sharpening attitudes towards the situation on the Belarussian border: not only was Belarus violating international law; it was waging a “hybrid war” as part of Putin’s efforts to steamroll Eastern Europe. Dictators like Lukashenko understood that fears over uncontrolled migration could provide rocket fuel to the anti-Ukraine far right.
For NGOs and liberals, the divergent realities of these two crises invited a reckoning. Their outcry, stark images of migrant pushbacks, and even shaming by EU institutions did nothing to change public feeling about Belarus. Even the most fervent pro-migration activists had to come to terms with reality.
One of Poland’s leading human rights scholars, Hanna Machińska, recounts visiting a high school where students shared two great fears: climate change and non-Western immigration. All the students wanted Poland’s borders closed. “What about human rights?” Machińska recalls asking. “We have to guard Europe’s borders” was the answer she got. The students she met combined a typical liberal view—identification with Europe and the EU—with a craving for a defined identity as a closed nation in a secure Europe, unchanged by an influx from the rest of the world.
Many activists have concluded that public sentiment cannot be swayed by moral lecturing; the fears run deep and must be addressed as they are. Agnieszka Kosowicz, director of the Polish Migrant Forum—an organization which supports migrants living in Poland—told me straight up that “our previous arguments about human rights, about universal human dignity, empathy, [...] do not work.” Recent polling confirms this: 73% of Poles said the top priority of migration policy should be to secure borders, while just 7% wanted to encourage migration.
Liberal political parties, realizing the new political reality, ran tough on migration in the 2023 Polish parliamentary elections. They benefitted from revelations that the PiS had offered huge numbers of visas to non-Western migrants, sometimes in exchange for bribes. They argued that they would be more competent at keeping down immigration numbers and securing EU support for tough policies. They won a decisive victory after eight years of PiS-dominated government.
The new liberal coalition faced two border crises, public sentiment that had moved sharply against non-Western migrants, the ever-present threat of the PiS’s return to power, and the need to repair Poland’s relationship with European institutions. Their response was the 2025-30 Migration Strategy, issued in late 2024. The Strategy outlined a points-based system to attract economic migration and promised to construct integration centers to help immigrants learn Polish and navigate social services.
But those proposals received little attention. Instead, the Strategy exploded in controversy for proposing a suspension of the right to apply for asylum on the Belarussian border. Poland implemented the suspension in February this year, which human rights NGOs condemned as a clear violation of the non-refoulement principle. To suspend the right to asylum as a whole was far worse than denying it in specific cases: it meant institutionalizing a lawless practice. In their view, one of the most conspicuous and fundamental human rights—the right to refuge—was being openly abridged, the Refugee Convention and other agreements were being broken, and a dangerous precedent was being created.
When I interviewed him this summer, Maciej Duszczyk, Undersecretary of State in the Polish interior ministry and architect of the Strategy, justified the government’s actions by invoking the security threat of Belarus’ instrumentalization of migrants. When the Geneva Convention and other international legal agreements were concluded, no one imagined the prospect of a calculated exploitation of asylum by a hostile foreign power. Duszczyk rattled off clauses from Poland’s Constitution, the Geneva Convention, and the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights which allowed security exemptions to the non-refoulement principle. Poland might not be at war, but an exceptional security risk justifies exceptional measures.
But the government’s defense went further than national security. Poland’s former Justice Minister, Adam Bodnar, justifies the policy by arguing: “if you are not controlling the border, it means that you are not effective [...] the effectiveness of the government should be cherished in defending liberal democracy, or you create a chance for voices against liberal democracy to create a fully illiberal project.” The government’s limitation of human rights, in his eyes, was a necessary tool to keep populists out of power.
Crucially, though, Duszczyk does not see the moves solely as concessions to political necessity. Rather, he sees them as part of the necessary work of statecraft to preserve a sense of social cohesion. Change that is too fast or too unpopular—especially for a country with a history of foreign exploitation, painful lockdowns during COVID, and a war on its border—risks failing the first test of government: providing people with a strong sense of security. Sociological research has borne out this concern, finding that the degree and pace of cultural and racial diversity in a place can diminish trust between people.
The great challenge is to balance a sense of security with humanitarianism. And Poland’s government insists its policy continues to honor humanitarian principles. The suspension of asylum exempts pregnant women, the disabled, and unaccompanied minors. (“No one cares if she’s from Somalia, Ethiopia, or Ukraine,” Duszczyk said. “If she’s a pregnant woman, it means that the application must be accepted.”) The Strategy strengthens measures against violence by border guards and prevents them from using guns against migrants. Duszczyk has taken as his motto the idea that there must be “zero deaths at the border.”
“If their life is at risk,” he argues, “we have to help them. Because we are human. And they are also human.”
For Duszczyk, these measures create a humanitarian floor while allowing a pragmatic deviation from legal codes. By emphasizing very basic humanitarian ideas—that the weak, old, and pregnant must be helped, and that every government must try to save lives where it can—he advocates an alternative to legalisms which have become politically untenable. If international law is too rigid, backlash will be fierce, populists will win, and the whole system will degrade.
Duszczyk has been lambasted by onetime colleagues and friends. A prominent legal professor described the government’s policy as “completely ignorant.” Hanna Machińska called the suspension of asylum the “cardinal sin” of this government. A former judge on Poland’s highest court told me that leaders must be “very, very cautious” in reinterpreting human rights conventions or risk a “denial of the blood and tears of millions of victims from the past.”
Despite these fears, Duszczyk is convinced his approach is working. In a two-month period after the asylum suspension, illegal crossings from Belarus fell by 48% compared to the same period in 2024. At the same time, in all of 2024, there was one death—out of 30,000 attempted crossings—in Polish territory. There have been none so far in 2025. Duszczyk feels his humanitarian floor is holding.
Other countries are following Poland’s example. The EU has gone from condemning the pushback policy to embracing the Polish government’s rhetoric of itself as the “Eastern Shield” of Europe. Many states are trying to balance taking steps to accommodate a changed social reality without wholly rejecting humanitarian principles or international law. In May, nine European leaders, ranging from Danish Social Democrat Mette Frederiksen to Italian nationalist Giorgia Meloni, submitted a letter to the European Court of Human Rights asking for interpretive leniency in assessing their countries’ migration control policies. The letter proclaimed that postwar human rights ideals are “everlasting,” but argued that human rights law, if enforced too rigidly, will only call those ideals into question.
The current political moment in the West is one in which the memories of war and genocide still ring loudly for many, especially for liberals. It is also one where political momentum is with ideas of stability and nationhood, and where most people do not want 75-year-old international legal schemes forcing their government to accept migrants. As long as both of these things are true, liberal governments will be in an awkward position and will need to make uncomfortable compromises. Their liberalism will become more selective and less demanding; it will appeal less to legal conventions and more to general and uncontroversial values like “preserving life” and helping the very weakest.
Activists, politicians, and scholars should all prepare for this world: one in which human rights law—especially as it pertains to immigration—loses its relevance, even for liberal and left-of-center governments. Keeping the human individual in view throughout this coming change, as Poland has attempted to do, will be a herculean task.
Leo Greenberg is a student at Yale University, where he studies History and Philosophy.
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I'm good with accepting at some point nationalism, patriotism and cultural homogeneity are all necessary and positive with respect to the ongoing safety, stability and success of a nation. It is just way too easy to note that heart and mind of immigrants today remain stuck in their home country culture, and their lack of love for their new home collectively degrades ongoing safety, stability and success of a nation.
To claim that this gets us to genocide is intellectually bankrupt and disgusting.
Perhaps Aristotle was onto something when he emphasized the importance of one’s culture “the polis” over individualism or one’s tribal “family” relationships.