Are border barriers an effective tool against the influx of irregular migration?

 Indeed, both Belarus and Russia, as well as gangs smuggling people, want to continue their operations.

However, without the barrier, Polish border control services overwhelmed by the scale of the migration wave could be paralysed.The construction of a physical fence along 186 kilometres of the border with Belarus and the installation of an electronic barrier have significantly reduced the migratory pressure artificially created in 2021 by the Alexander Lukashenko (Belarusian president) regime.

While more than 3,500 attempts to illegally cross the Polish-Belarusian border were recorded in August 2021, just before the peak of the migration crisis, in August 2023, the Border Guard recorded only 2,800 crossings. But prior to construction of the infrastructure securing the Polish border, there could have been many more such attempts. As Border Guard spokeswoman Lieutenant Anna Michalska said, prior to the installation of the barrier, it was virtually impossible to determine the precise number of those attempting to illegally cross the border.
Construction of a barrier has also proved effective against the increased number of irregular migrants on the Lithuanian-Belarusian border. According to the Lithuanian Border Guard, after completion (in November 2022) of the 500-kilometre-long, 3.5-metre-high wire barrier, the number of attempts to cross into Lithuania dropped from 8,106 in 2021 and 11,000 in 2022, to 1,597 in 2023.

Worldwide, the number of physical barriers has been increasing for decades. According to a publication by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid entitled 'Radiography of Ceuta and Melilla. Human rights violations at the southern border', in 1990, 15 countries put up barriers at their borders, and in 2016, another 55 countries joined them. The total length of all barriers to stop irregular migration at that time was 1,000 km.
Physical barriers, although criticised by left-wing parties, are considered an effective, but not ideal, tool against irregular migration, especially in crisis situations. Barriers need to be upgraded and reinforced, as the example of Ceuta in Spain shows. The 8-kilometre-long barrier constructed there in the 1990s started to effectively function after it was raised to more than 3 metres, following the example of a similar structure in Melilla. It is worth mentioning that Spanish left-wing governments, despite declaring their support for pro-migration policies, extended the border barriers.

The American Secure Fence Act for the construction of a barrier on the US border with Mexico was almost unanimously passed by the US Senate in 2006 by both Republicans and Democrats. Many forgot about it, although the plan, now to some extent continued by the Biden administration, was implemented by President Donald Trump.
In Poland, the decision to build the barrier was made by parliament in autumn 2021 though the opposition parties voted against it. At that time, a record number of migrants brought by Belarusian security services attempted to cross Poland’s border illegally. The relevant law came into force in November 2021, and the cost of construction was estimated at over PLN 1.6 billion (EUR 350 million), including PLN 115 million (EUR 25 million) for electronic equipment such as cameras and motion sensors.
The reduction of the migration wave may have already been influenced by the decision to build the barrier and the determination to thwart the plan to destabilise Poland. In November 2021, the Border Guard recorded 8,917 attempts to illegally cross the border, and in December only 1,740.

Genesis

The migration crisis on Poland’s border with Belarus was started by the regime of Alexander Lukashenko. The Belarusian authorities, in cooperation with smugglers, organised a system of bringing migrants, mainly from the Middle East and Africa, to Belarus and then moving them close to the borders with European Union countries, including Poland.
Organising a migration route through Poland (as well as Lithuania) was similar to a 2015-2016 operation, when the Russian authorities launched an Arctic migration route through the northern section of the Russian-Finnish border, leading to the largest migration crisis in Finland's post-war history. Moscow most likely wanted to force Helsinki into talks, and the price for stemming the flow of migrants to Finland, as the Centre for Eastern Studies wrote in its publication ‘Forcing cooperation: the Finnish-Russian migration crisis’, would be a change in Helsinki's harsh policy towards Russia, adopted after the 2014 Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine.  
The 2021 operation, named 'Sluice' by the Belarusian services, began in May 2021 with a growing wave of attempts to illegally cross the border, first into Lithuania, and from August 2021, also into Poland.
In Poland, the number of attempted illegal border crossings, compared to the same period in 2020, increased by a leap of three hundredfold. In 2021, a total of 39,697 such incidents were recorded.

According to a communiqué of the Border Guard Headquarters, dated 12 January 2022, the number of foreigners attempting to enter the territory of Poland, and thus the territory of the European Union, had been increasing on a daily basis since August 2021.
The peak of migratory pressure in 2021 was in October, when a total of 17,447 attempts to cross the border with Belarus were recorded. This number, although declining in November and December, remained at an incomparably higher level than in the same period of previous years, when a maximum of over a hundred such attempts were recorded annually (and the highest number was at the border with Ukraine).
Units of the Podlaskie Branch of the Border Guard faced the highest migration pressure during the height of the migration crisis in 2021. The highest number was in the area of Michałowo (5,466 crossing attempts), Mielnik (4,890), Białowieza (4,855) and Czeremcha (4,890) These are mostly the land part of the Polish-Belarusian border (the Augustów Canal, for example, is an exception), easier to illegally cross than the area where the border runs on the Bug River.
From August to December 2021, in the Bug River Border Guard Unit there were far fewer attempts to cross the border illegally (from a few to 127 cases per Border Guard post). This proves that a difficult barrier, in this case a natural one, discourages both smugglers and their clients from attempting to cross the border.

How does the barrier work?

The barrier is 5.5 metres high, consisting of steel poles topped with a coil of razor wire and is set on a concrete structure making it difficult to dig under. It is a much more elaborate structure than most of such barriers in Europe.
For example, the 1990s Spanish barriers in Ceuta and Melilla are simpler, yet they forced smugglers to change routes for smuggling migrants from sub-Saharan Africa. After modernisation, both of these barriers were 3.1 metres high and were effective at the time in stemming the wave of migrants, although it is worth remembering that then the traffic on the 'green' border was much lighter than today. According to the then minister of the interior of Spain, José Ramón Ónega, 152 illegal border crossings were recorded in Melilla in February 1998, but only 45 in the summer.
Michalska said that the Polish barrier (both forms of it) not only makes it more difficult for migrants to cross the border, but also facilitates the work of the guards. "Thanks to the electronic barrier (consisting, among other things, of motion sensors and cameras along the 206-kilometre length – FH), we monitor all incidents on the border, and, in case of attempts to illegally cross it, we have enough time to react and send patrols to the place of the incident," she explained. Sensors and cameras also provide information on those approaching the border line.

Thus, thanks to a signal from the electronic barrier, Polish patrols are able to react in time, as was the case on 13 September, in Podcerkówka near the Białowieza National Park, where 19 Syrians were detained for trying to illegally cross the border.
However, some migrants managed to get through the barrier, which does not happen without the help of the Belarusian security services cooperating with the smugglers. Minister of Interior and Administration Mariusz Kaminski described in an interview with Polish Radio an incident in which a Belarusian soldier tried to saw a steel pole of the barrier but when he saw a Polish border guard he ran away.
Migrants pay dearly for the help of the security services and smugglers. As Kaminski said, "these are relatively wealthy people", and some of money given to smugglers is transferred to the Lukashenko regime.

According to a 2021 European Parliament report, up to 90 percent of irregular migrants trying to enter Europe do so with the help of smugglers. German website dw.com has recently written about it. A gang smuggling migrants from Syria to Spain was charging up to EUR 20,000 per person for preparing the entire route, according to the Europol website.
Also, the website balkaninsight.com wrote about the costs of crossing the Polish or Lithuanian border. The publication, entitled ‘How Smugglers Bring Migrants into EU Despite Poland's New Wall on Belarus Border,’ emphasised that the Polish route (called by Frontex the ‘Eastern Borders Route’) continues to operate despite the construction of the barrier. It is an excellent business for smuggling gangs, and the harder it is to get across the border, the greater the profit.
Smugglers convince migrants that crossing the Polish border is a piece of cake, and if they fail, they are expected to make repeated attempts. Every new attempt means, of course, thousands more dollars. According to balkaninsight.com, the cost of the entire journey is USD 10,000. And then a facilitator helping the migrant to cross the border charges between USD 3,500 and USD 5,000. The organisers of the smuggling reside outside Europe, often in the Middle East, but have a network of co-workers at their disposal, usually residents of Eastern European countries.

Migrants first fly to Moscow, where they receive a visa, and then travel to the capital of Belarus. From Minsk they are taken to the vicinity of the Polish border. It should be noted that, contrary to the vision outlined by those who wish to accept Minsk's and Moscow's actions in the name of misunderstood humanitarian values, women and children are extremely rare among the migrants waiting to be transported to the border forests. Whereas in the early stages of the crisis they constituted a certain, although small, group of people trying to enter Poland and the EU, now they are almost non-existent. “The last case of a woman illegally crossing the border was in May this year,” Michalska said.
Not only migrants, but also smugglers and Belarusian security services gather around the barrier. So, the barrier also increases the security of Polish patrols, although attacks on guards and soldiers are becoming more frequent. For the time being they are attack with stones, but it should be remembered that once migrants were armed. On September 12, the de.euronews.com website reported that near the Serbian-Hungarian border, in the forest of Hajdukovac, there was a shootout between migrants, and one person died. Local police confiscated rifles.

Thanks to the fact that the Polish Border Guard, through motion sensors and cameras, receives information about incidents at the border, it can provide timely medical assistance to migrants. According to Michalska, since the beginning of the migration crisis, i.e., since August 2021, there have been 840 call-outs of Medical Rescue Teams to foreigners illegally crossing the Polish-Belarusian border. Many of these calls were made by Border Guard officers, who have also rescued migrants themselves. "Since the beginning of the migration crisis, Border Guard officers have carried out 23 life-saving operations, in difficult conditions, mainly in marshes, during which 73 foreigners were rescued," Michalska added.
The effectiveness of combining a physical fence with electronic monitoring has also been noted in the US. In 2020, after constructing more than 380 miles (more than 600 km) of modern barrier on the border with Mexico, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) noted that a small (less than 20 km) section of wall near San Diego could be manned with a much smaller crew of 150, saving USD 28 million a year.

27.09.23