**1. Introduction**

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented process of immobility for billions of people globally. Not only was traffic across borders stopped, but any mobility within countries as well. However, at the same time, many people were forced to leave their country of residence, while others were unable to return home, although they wanted to (Chamie 2020). As Thomas Nail aptly noted, 'The COVID world is just like it was before, only more so. (...) Things were awful before COVID, now they are worse' (Nail 2020, pp. 889, 891). This observation very accurately reflects the deepening segregation of immigrants on Polish borders after March 2020.

There is an extensive body of literature about the ambivalent attitude of Polish authorities towards immigration: the far-right governmen<sup>t</sup> of 'Law and Justice' party, which has been ruling since the end of 2015, came to power using anti-immigrant and xenophobic slogans in the election campaign. They stoked fear of 'others' caused by the so-called refugee crisis of 2015–2016 (Koulish and van der Woude 2020), resulting in a drastic deterioration of the public's attitude towards refugees in Poland (P ˛edziwiatr and Legut 2016; Jaskułowski 2019). This fear was artificially orchestrated by politicians, because no people from the Mediterranean region, Africa or Central Asia had come to Poland seeking international protection—whether in an illegal manner (the Balkan route bypassed Poland), nor legally, i.e., through resettlement or relocations in which Poland refused to participate

**Citation:** Klaus, Witold. 2021. The Porous Border Woven with Prejudices and Economic Interests. Polish Border Admission Practices in the Time of COVID-19. *Social Sciences* 10: 435. https://doi.org/10.3390/ socsci10110435

Academic Editor: Robert Koulish

Received: 31 July 2021 Accepted: 9 November 2021 Published: 13 November 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

(CJEU 2020). Despite this, the governmen<sup>t</sup> successively developed laws and policies based on xenophobia, the aim of which was to prevent refugees from entering Poland (Klaus 2017; 2020b). Quite quickly, however, the practices of the Polish authorities became steeped in ambivalence. A huge antipathy to refugees and the intention to drive them away from Polish borders was accompanied by relatively high receptiveness to economic migrants— although mainly those from neighbouring countries, i.e., primarily from Ukraine (Klaus 2020a). The trend could be attributed to the demands of employers who faced significant shortages of workers. As a result of this process (which the governmen<sup>t</sup> neither supported nor opposed), from 2018 onwards, Poland began to gradually emerge as a country of immigration. In recent years, it has, in fact, been leading the list of EU countries with the highest number of newly admitted immigrants (Solga and Tereszkiewicz 2020). In this respect, with the reluctance of the governmen<sup>t</sup> and society's restraint towards migration and the simultaneous blending of many migrants into the local labour markets, Poland is not unlike, say, Italy from the first decade of the 21st century (Ambrosini 2013).

In this paper, I would like to present how the above processes were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. I will focus on the possibilities of entering and staying in Poland for different groups of immigrants. I will demonstrate how many facilitating measures have been introduced for economic migrants, especially for Ukrainians (yet not necessarily so for people from more distant and other ethnically different countries) when it comes to their arrival and work. At the same time, the border for asylum seekers was tightly closed, but only in one direction—the governmen<sup>t</sup> did not allow them to enter Poland. Meanwhile, return procedures were ongoing and people were held in detention awaiting them. An interesting breakthrough in this policy came in the autumn of 2020, when the governmen<sup>t</sup> decided to introduce far-reaching facilitating measures exclusively for asylum seekers fleeing Belarus.
