Paris attacks undermine European Union refugee policy, new Polish gov’t says

In the wake of the attacks in Paris, the country’s politicians are already calling for the nation to reevaluate the openness of its borders. In the aftermath of Friday’s attacks, which killed at least 129 people in locations around Paris, European leaders again issued statements of sympathy and outrage, while their citizens turned out en masse with flowers and candles to show solidarity.

European Union President Donald Tusk said earlier that signs had emerged that attacks on moderate opposition forces in Syria were creating a new flood of refugees.

He warned the Russian operations would “only result (in) a new wave of refugees”. As my colleague David Graham wrote Monday, “there’s no magic formula for striking the right balance of security and humanitarianism, but the process for [resettling] Syrian refugees is hardly cursory-in fact, until the Paris attacks, there was a great deal of criticism arguing it was far too strict”.

Second, global efforts to address the refugee crisis can involve other, more distant, countries, which are able and should be induced to take refugees. [Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images]The refugee crisis was a key issue during Poland’s recent election, and the Paris attacks have given the right-leaning, Eurosceptic Law and Justice Party another reason not cooperate with the quota mandate.

Poland said it can not go ahead with European Union decisions on immigration and accept refugees without guarantees of security.

In response to rising right-wing reactions to the Paris attacks, Thomas de Maiziere, Germany’s interior minister, cautioned against connecting the terror attacks in Paris to the record-breaking influx of refugees in Europe. “Poland must retain complete control of its borders, as well as its asylum and migration policy”, Szymanski insisted on the site. Ms. Merkel and the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, have staked much on the idea of registering migrants at processing centers, dubbed “hot spots”, in Greece and Italy, and in distributing them around the EU under a quota system.

“We do not know if the passport was checked by other countries through which the holder likely passed”.

He denied that the breach of Europe’s borders by these two terrorists demonstrated that the Schengen open border agreement was fatally flawed, saying: “The decision of the French President for a while reintroducing border controls is expressly provided for in the Schengen Agreement, in order to respond to the location of such events”. “There’s no question that this is going to make these discussions more complicated”. Belgium was preoccupied by the news that three people said to be associated with the Paris attacks had been arrested outside Brussels. “Even though it’s only one individual, all fingers will be pointed at refugees, blaming them for attacks like these”.

But neither the Danish People’s Party, the main Danish anti-immigrant group, nor their Swedish equivalents, the Sweden Democrats, have used the Paris attacks as a propaganda tool.

First, it is essential to direct that support to Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, as spillover from the conflict in Syria and Iraq overwhelms them, both in terms of their hosting more than 4 million refugees and in dealing with bomb attacks.