February 13, 2024 - 7:00am
Donald Tusk, Poland’s new prime minister, said mass migration was a civilisational threat in a Sunday speech.
“Please believe me – and I say this also looking at what is happening in the US today – this is a question of the survival of our Western civilisation,” Tusk said, according to Notes from Poland. “We [must] wake up and understand that we have to protect our territory, our borders, that if we are open to all forms of migration without any control, our world will collapse.”
Tusk, a liberal, took over as PM in December after eight years of rule by the Right-wing Law and Justice party, and he is widely viewed as a foil to Poland’s past conservative leadership on a host of issues, including his pro-EU position. Thus his strong anti-immigration remarks come as something of a surprise.
The comments came in response to a question about the country’s border with Belarus, a hotspot for illegal immigration of African and Middle Eastern migrants into Poland. The Polish government has handled this through “pushbacks” of migrants back into Belarus, drawing the ire of humans rights organisations. More than 6,000 pushbacks occurred over the past six months.
“The first and most important task of the Polish state when it comes to the situation at the border is to protect the border, including from illegal migration,” Tusk has said.
The Polish PM said that he aims to restrict illegal immigration in a humane way and ensure that pushbacks are not necessary, but that he “will not make any decision that will recklessly result in our border becoming less tight than it is now”. He blamed the country’s immigration problem on alleged corruption and dysfunction by the previous ruling party.
This isn’t the first time Tusk has taken a harsh tone on immigration. In the summer, he sharply criticised the ruling party for letting in migrants from “Islamic countries”, and last month he said “Poland will not accept a single migrant under EU relocation scheme”, earning himself comparisons to Donald Trump.
During his campaign last year, Tusk drew on anti-immigration themes and called for Poland to regain control of its borders, drawing sharp criticism from the country’s Left wing for “competing with the far Right”.
Tusk’s vows to restrict illegal immigration, and his reference to the US border crisis, come amid a swelling tide of anti-immigration sentiments across the West. The prime minister said that his government “will do what we have to in order not to violate [legal] standards and to prevent situations that violate the core of humanitarianism…It cannot be that people are dying on the Polish side of the border”.
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SubscribeIt’s funny how mass immigration stops being racist when you become the person having to deal with it.
Even entrenched technocrats can figure that out. Hell, even Biden is starting to change his tune.
Only because election is shortly. If he wins then he will go back to importing more Dem voters.
Cry a bit more. At least Tusk flattened a set of anti drmocraric anti abortionists. Goid eh?
Yes, opposition and protests are always easier. Neither of them demand responsibility. Mister Tusk is right. The West cannot have both.
Good. Common sense still alive and well in Poland at least.
High time that the rules were changed to allow “pushback” of illegal immigrants to the last known country they came from.
But seriously, are you willing to forgive this guy? After everything since 2015, the insults, the threats and so on?
One battle at a time. At least he’s come down on the right side on this one – the alternative is worse.
At least he is saying he’s come down……
Don’t believe a word of it.
Is he not simply trying to save his own skin with a few cheap words? Having built a career on singing the praises of open borders, he is an unlikely champion of national identity. Then again, he has been fairly heavy handed in the treatment of political opponents – the Polish electorate will have noted and disapproved, so he has every reason to try and sweeten them. In short, he is a cynical power broker, who will do and say anything to stay on top. He is definitely not to be trusted.
I agree; this bloke is the preferred EU stooge and just like Useless von der Leyen’s recent ‘softening stance’ towards farmers, is all with an eye on the forthcoming European elections.
Our lot are no better of course and just two cheeks of the same ar¥e. Maybe it’ll take a Civil War to sort this out now, unless our country degrades to such an extent that nobody wants to come here anymore.
There is one “Asylum Seeker” jumping up-and-down, demanding to be sent back because it’s “no longer any good in the UK.” For some reason he says the police won’t let him go. Good – hold onto him and let him speak against the British (Isles} all he likes. Maybe then some of the people aiming to come here will get the message. Meanwhile – why haven’t we done what the Germans have been saying for years – don’t give them such good conditions vis-a-vis Cash, phones, housing,etc. (Thr Irish don’t).
Are you noting the prospect of Civil War, or advocating it?
It’ll be even harder to chase the barbarians from your shores and gates when people start killing real and perceived enemies among their own countrymen.
But I gues the influx of Outsiders could indeed be halted if your homeland becomes a de facto “no travel zone”. I’m not saying the immigration situation is fine on either side of the Atlantic, but I hope it doesn’t come to that, here or there. Not saying you do, just my unsolicited tuppence.
Not a few cheap words. Donald Tusk sang the praises of open borders within the EU. No serious person, whether they are liberal or right wing can honestly believe that open borders worldwide are workable or desirable. The unspoken truth is that British politicians from Labour to Reform UK actually believe that the state ideology of multicultural communitarianism is an intrinsic good, not what it really is, an exercise in divide and rule. Indeed seen from this perspective the most distant culturally from British culture the better. That was actually the real meaning of Brexit.
Interestingly, in a Russian context, Putin is the “open borders” man, he is an anti-European and his is a Eurasian ideology. He has kept borders open to the now independent Islamic republics to the south, leading to large-sccale migration from those areas into cities like Moscow. It is actually pro-European liberals like Navalny who attack Putin for his failure to impose border controls. Likewise he would like to see autonomous republics like Chechenya which are still in the Russian Federation become independent.
I don’t like Tusk especially but this is just common sense. No political party serious about getting into (or staying in) power in any European country would campaign/govern on a platform of “all refugees welcome” and lax immigration standards.
The current German government is perhaps an exception to that but no doubt the sensible Poles have looked over the border, rightly thought “there’s no way we’re going to let that happen here” and that is why Tusk is saying stuff like this.
The only way this is ever going to get sorted out is if the entitlement to claim asylum and have your claim processed in the EU is limited to people coming from neighbouring countries, like Turkey or the Ukraine. All other immigration/asylum applications need to go to (and be processed at) points set up in the countries of origin. Pushbacks of people who come anyway need to be legalised. For those not entitled who do evade pushbacks and get over the border, detention until they can be deported to their country of origin. Detention for anyone who arrives without papers until such papers can be produced. Every incentive for illegal immigration needs to be strangled and rules enforced, even if that does produce some upsetting scenes. Because, at the end of the day – if you can’t handle upsettng scenes at the border, you will have upsetting scenes on your own streets sooner or later.
For that to happen, the judicial framework under which the EU (and the UK, still) labours will have to be changed. That could take some time…
On the other hand…Dublin just ceased to be enforced when reality overtook it. It’s still technically IN force, but it’s as dead as a dodo.
That might happen with the larger framework. Even constitutions crumble if there is enough pressure.
In other words, sometimes, you can let events on the ground drive the changes rather than a proactive legislative process. The pushbacks are only the start of that.
A qualification to the statement that mass migration is a civilizational threat. To the extent that migrants blend into the culture and society of their new country, adopting its values and mores, that is how civilizations grow, rather than ossify and stagnate. When these immigrant populations try to recreate the dysfunctional Third World hell they came from, building mosques and setting up schools to teach their children and grandchildren how to maintain that dysfunctional hell here on our shores for their future generations, that is how our civilization is destroyed.
You are correct, and it is the difference between integrated migrants in manageable numbers, and mass migrations bringing and wanting keep their previous culture and lifestyle, that those of the Left won’t acknowledge.
Which of the options that you outlined seems more likely?
I think this is unsupported wishful thinking. Give examples of success. In the case of Britain, there were a few Huguenots in the 17th c and a few Jews in the 19th c and early 20th c which worked well as the numbers were very small, the people talented and the kind who could fit in. The other group, the Irish who were actually British, made and found life difficult in Liverpool and Glasgow. North America and Australia just worked when the immigrants were European but not so much since. It’s a pity Afro-Americans were not given their own state after the civil war and were given the chance to avoid Jim Crow etc and develop their own country with some substantial compensation/reparations to help them get going; likewise the aboriginals in Oz.
Or perhaps if they weren’t brought to America in chains in the first place. But much like Native Americans, who had their ancestral homelands gradually then suddenly overtaken by European colonists, that wasn’t by choice.
I don’t think you’ve solved or illuminated anything with your counterfactual-history thought experiment.
African-Americans are now full Americans, as much so as my Detroit-born white mother, with great-great grandparents who were mostly born in Ireland.
Fourth generation Indian-Brits are, generally speaking, about as British as you, though they mightn’t look it.
If the Anglo-Saxons and invading Normans eventually came to more-or-less peacefully coexist, why can’t that extend across (superficial) lines of color or ancestral cultural background?
Don’t you know any Brits of Indian or African descent who are well-assimilated and patriotic enough?
This is all true – but the most immediate consequence of mass immigration is a widening of the class divide. House prices and rents go up, wages are squeezed. This exposes the hypocrisy of the middle class left who preach the virtues of ‘openness’ whilst helping themselves to all the benefits at the same time as dumping all the costs on poorer people. Eventually the wider population realises what’s being done to them and it’s game over for the globalists. So it’s not all bad.
We Americans recommend “e pluribus unum”to that effect – choosing to join together and be forged into one via the “melting pot” of shared values.
Unfortunately, and ironically, most Americans have devolved into thinking that this “melting pot” idea is about making soup out of as many random elements as possible and savoring the resulting contradictory flavor.
That why “Salad Bowl”, while still imperfect–and nasty or cannibalistic from a culinary standpoint–is a better sort of metaphor.
Some level of assimilation is needed but of course we don’t and shouldn’t have to get melted down into some kind of undifferentiated broth.
“By Unherd Staff” – is nobody prepared to own this story?
There’s a difference between rhetoric and action. Until he actually does something concrete I’m dismissing Tusk’s rhetoric as like the Tories rhetoric on immigration for the past two decades – all talk
Is the beginning of a new political trend – establishment apparatchik politicians spouting opinions previously denounced as mindless populist prejudice? Sounds like a sly managerial tactic rather than a Damascene conversion. Actions will speak louder than words – expect plenty of token gestures, sticking-plaster fixes and a lot of cautious fence-sitting.
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Yes I think it’s a containment strategy, not a real conversion
Fair enough, N. Satori.
We should all bear in mind that rank cynicism can be a rather tricky and adaptable guide, much like gross hypocrisy. I know this first hand. How much border control in Poland (or closer to home)–and of what sort– would it take to speak loud enough for your ear?
Thumbs up on the Bob Dylan quote alone.
Just to remind everyone here: he’s the leader of the party which, two years ago, wanted to allow all “immigrants” (sent there deliberately by Putin to distract the public) that assaulted Polish border with Belarus and shouted down anyone who opposed this as racist. This is, by the way, the origin story of A.Holland’s movie “The green border” – and several reporters from the leftist press (Gazeta Wyborcza) have recently admitted that all stories about starving children and mothers on this border, used by Holland, were simply made up.
This isn’t the first time Tusk has taken a harsh tone on immigration. — When trying to make a point politely and rationally does not work, then you’re left with harsh. Is he wrong? No sane American is looking at the border and thinking, “we need more of that.”
Maybe his is a conversion of convenience, maybe he’s that exceedingly rare politician who realized his previous stance was wrong but won’t explicitly say so. Either way, does that matter? The real question is, what happens next. A politician’s words are among the most worthless of commodities.
The mass u-turn continues.
“When we win, do not forget that these people want you broke, dead, your kids r*ped and brainwashed, and they think it’s funny.”
I believe that the discontent among Europeans regarding immigration (soft and passive colony) may stem from a perception that it is more effective than historical colonization efforts which used aggression and violence. I advocate for stricter border control measures, but these should be accompanied by significant reforms, including the dissolution of major international financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as a reevaluation of global trade practices. This approach is rooted in a principle of fairness. Personally, I am prepared to adapt to a more seasonal and local diet, such as consuming potatoes during the winter and apples in the summer, underscoring my commitment to these views. I believe that by adopting this approach, immigration will become a two-way flow. However, it is not feasible to exploit the power of financial institutions while simultaneously closing borders to individuals seeking better opportunities. Or we stay ostrich!
In Canada immigrant protestors blocked access to a Jewish hospital. Drive by shootings in Jewish neighborhoods. Open celebrations of Oct 7 by immigrant groups.
The “civilisational threat” is Tusk and the EU cabal.
Tusk has already surrendered to Brussels’ plan for voluntary relocation of illegal immigrants to Poland or pay fees (sic!).