The so-called refugee crisis in 2015 coincided with the Polish parliamentary electoral campaign.

No abstract

In this paper we focus on adapting the concept of push – pull factors to forced migration by proposing a “push out – push back” approach that underlines two most crucial elements of forced migrants’ experience. On the one hand, it stresses the reasons for leaving countries of origin or of temporary refuge that are not dependant on the will of people who flew those places, thus the “push out” factors. On the other hand, it represents the refusal of the countries of the Global North to accept forced migrants and their use of various practices, amounting to “push back” factors, to prevent them from entering or leaving their territory if they manage to reach it. These factors can be divided into three groups: passive, active, and symbolic.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Referring to the theoretical reflection on securitization in the area of forced migration and applying Barak Kalir’s concept of Departheid, we investigate policies and practices deployed by the Polish authorities to deal with humanitarian migrants. In particular between 2015 and 2021, in the Polish context, humanitarian migrants were usually equated with ‘bogus’ asylum seekers, ‘undeserving’ of protection or even the right to apply for it. With the increasing presence of Belarusian and, more recently, Ukrainian asylum seekers in Poland, two completely different state attitudes towards asylum seekers reaching Poland’s borders became visible. People directly fleeing Belarus and Ukraine were seen as deserving protection and support, and faced no obstacles in entering Poland through its eastern border. At the same time, non-White people forced to leave Asian or African regions in crisis, attempting to cross the border and to enter Poland remained ‘unwanted’—to be deterred or deported, and thus illegalized at some stage of their mobility, usually already at the point of entrance. Based on the analysis of empirical data gathered between 2018 and 2021, we look for durable solutions for the latter category of migrants and investigate the reasons for the selectivity observed in the Polish practices towards asylum seekers. We conclude that the governmental approach perpetuated towards keeping humanitarian migrants away from Polish territory, especially in the post-2015 context, builds on xenophobic sentiments, making the concept of Departheid applicable to the realities of forced migration management in Poland.

The aim of the article is to present one of the facets of the state’s approach towards irregular migration, namely identification of and reaction of the law enforcement and judiciary to the offence of facilitating or enabling unauthorised stay of another person and gaining personal or material profits from it (introduced to the Polish legislation in 2004). Based on the analysis of court files of 243 criminal cases, we indicate forms of facilitation of unauthorised stay (with predominance of document frauds) and analyse the features of the constitutive elements of the offence, i.e. facilitators, persons whose stay is enabled, and profits. We conclude that among convicted facilitators there are those whose intensions were far from enabling the stay of another person and actual facilitators often remained unidentified. We also point to doubtful court decisions, in particular those regarding undetermined profits and recipients or recipients sentenced as facilitators. Thus, we prove that despite the declared prioritisation of irregular migration as a problem to be tackled in Poland, the practice of the law enforcement agents and the courts reveals a determination to achieve easy targets, following known paths, as well as abandoning areas that require more attention and possibly also efforts.