Marienfelde

There is a building in the south of Berlin called the Marienfelde Refugee Transit Centre. Between 1953 and 1990 more than a million people passed through it. In the 1980s, a striking number of them were Polish. They had not queued at an embassy. They had not been issued resettlement visas. They had boarded flights to East Berlin — which required no Western visa — walked across to the other half of the city, and declared themselves refugees in a country that had never invited them. West Germany took them in. It housed them, fed them, processed them, and when their asylum claims were rejected — as, by the mid-1980s, most Polish claims were — it let them stay anyway, because deporting people into General Jaruzelski's Poland was unthinkable.

The countries with actual choice in the matter — the United States, Canada, Australia — then selected the ones they wanted from the camps, at their leisure, screening for skills and health and politics. The frontline state took everyone. The distant states took their pick. That was the deal, and Poland's entire post-war diaspora — and a good part of its post-1989 recovery — was built on it.

Forty years later, Poland is the frontline state. And it has decided the deal no longer applies.

The wall and the forest

Since 2021, Poland has met irregular arrivals at its border with Belarus with a steel fence, a militarised exclusion zone, and a practice the government calls "turning back" and the European Court of Human Rights calls refoulement. People — largely Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Yemenis — are pushed back into the forest strip between the two states, sometimes repeatedly, in winter. Dozens have died there. In 2024 the Polish government went further and legislated the power to suspend the acceptance of asylum applications at the border altogether — a provision cheerfully retained, extended and legalised not by the national-conservative government that built the fence, but by the liberal, avowedly pro-European coalition that replaced it. On this one subject, Polish politics is unanimous.

The official justification is that this is not migration at all but hybrid warfare: the Lukashenko regime flies people to Minsk and funnels them at the border to destabilise the EU. This is true. It is also irrelevant to the question of what the individuals in the forest are owed, and Poland's own history is the proof.

The regime that pushed them out

The Polish People's Republic did not merely fail to prevent emigration. It manufactured it. In 1968 the regime ran a state-directed antisemitic campaign that drove some thirteen to fifteen thousand Polish Jews out of the country, stripping them of citizenship and issuing one-way travel documents. After martial law in 1981, interned Solidarity activists were offered a choice between prison and a one-way passport. A hostile state, deliberately dumping people it wished to be rid of onto the West, for its own political purposes.

Nobody in Vienna or West Berlin argued that because Warsaw had engineered the outflow, the people themselves could be turned back into the GDR. The cynicism of the sending state was understood to be a fact about the sending state. The rights of the person at the border attached to the person. The Refugee Convention — which Poland has signed — is built on exactly that distinction, and it is the distinction Poland's "instrumentalisation" defence asks us to forget. A Syrian does not stop being a potential refugee because Lukashenko had his own reasons for putting her on a plane, any more than a Polish Jew stopped being one because Gomułka wanted him gone.

The defences, taken in order

"We came legally." No. A large share of 1980s Polish emigration consisted of people leaving on tourist visas they had no intention of honouring, or simply not coming back, then claiming asylum in countries that had not offered it. By the definition Poland applies at its own border today, they were irregular migrants. They were treated generously because it suited the West, in that decade, to embarrass the Eastern Bloc — a political tailwind, not a legal entitlement.

"They were genuine refugees; these are economic migrants." The 1980s caseload was saturated with primarily economic migrants who benefited from a loose political presumption; West German rejection rates say as much. Meanwhile a substantial share of today's Belarus-route arrivals come from Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen — places with asylum claims that 1980s Poland, whatever its miseries, could not begin to match. Nobody was barrel-bombing Kraków.

"Every country chooses whom it admits." The countries that mattered most did not choose. West Germany could not stop entry through East Berlin and could not deport those it refused. It absorbed the unchosen burden precisely so that the distant states could exercise their sovereignty at leisure. Poland today holds the position West Germany held then — and has responded by awarding itself, through steel and pushback, the privileges of a distant state. Had Bonn applied Warsaw's current logic in 1982, the Polish diaspora would have frozen in the no-man's-land between the walls, and there would be no Polish plumber of London legend, no remittance economy, no safety valve for the transition.

"We have done our share — look at Ukraine." This is the strongest card, and it deserves to be played honestly. Poland's reception of Ukrainians after February 2022 was extraordinary: millions sheltered at the peak, around a million still resident, given schooling, healthcare and labour-market access, absorbed into homes rather than warehoused in camps. Per capita it exceeds anything most Western European states have managed in any crisis. It also demonstrates something Poland presumably did not intend to demonstrate: that the country's capacity to receive refugees, at enormous scale and speed, is not in question. Only its willingness is — and the willingness turns out to track ethnicity, religion and culture with uncomfortable precision. White, Christian, Slavic neighbours: the Temporary Protection Directive activated within days. Brown, Muslim strangers: the forest. Jarosław Kaczyński, campaigning in 2015, was candid enough to say so out loud — warning that migrants carried "parasites and protozoa" dangerous to the local population. The policy has not changed since. Only the candour has.

The ledger

Poland is the largest net beneficiary of the EU budget in the Union's history — comfortably over €150 billion net since accession, the motorways and railways and regional funds that turned it into Europe's growth story. It gained at least as much again from free movement: the two million who went west after 2004 were the pressure release that made the transition survivable, and the remittances flowed home. When Poland wants money, energy solidarity or collective defence, it invokes the principle that the Union is a community of mutual obligation, and it is right to.

Solidarity that runs in only one direction has another name. Poland cannot present itself as solidarity's creditor on Thursdays and deny being its debtor on Fridays. The new EU migration pact quietly ratifies the evasion by letting member states buy their way out of relocation with cash — solidarity as an indulgence, purchasable, ethnically filtered at source.

The uncomfortable part

It would be convenient to end there, with Poland as the singular villain. It is not. The states now tut-tutting from the west run the same selection, executed at the departure gate rather than the border fence. Carrier sanctions, visa regimes and safe-third-country doctrines ensure that no Afghan can lawfully board a flight to Heathrow or Frankfurt to claim asylum; Britain builds bespoke visa routes for Hong Kongers and Ukrainians while rendering spontaneous arrival by anyone else functionally impossible. This is selection by nationality, laundered through paperwork. Poland's offence is to do crudely, visibly, with razor wire, what the respectable states do discreetly, with airline check-in desks. The hypocrisy is systemic. Poland is merely its least deniable practitioner — and the one whose own history makes the practice unanswerable.

Because that is what distinguishes the Polish case. Other nations can at least pretend they were never on the other side of the wire. Poland cannot. Its museums commemorate the exodus. Its diaspora funded its recovery. Its politicians' own families, in more cases than is comfortable, came through Traiskirchen and Friedland and Marienfelde. A country that owes its modern existence to the principle that the person at the border is assessed as a person — whoever sent them, however they came — has decided that the principle expired the moment it stopped being the beneficiary.

The door two million Poles walked through is still there, in the south of Berlin. It is a museum now. Poland should visit, before it finishes bricking up its own.

C.J. Marsden writes on political economy at ir35andmore.com.