A Polish man is taking Germany to court over checks at the German-Polish border. He says that it’s not just because they make life difficult, but also because they contravene EU law.
Gud gud, those checks are unnecessary at the moment
And those checks are also absolutely useless. It’s so easy to bypass them if you want to.
I hope he succeeds. It will piss off the right-wingers and euro-sceptics.
This illustrates a huge political problem for the EU that is very difficult I resolve. Citizens want freedom of movement but they also don’t want illegal immigration and crime. It’s difficult to resolve the two.
But it does need to be addressed as it does undermine the EU and we’ve seen time and again across Europe that the far right are advancing in polls driven in large part by concerns around immigration which are not being well addressed by the centre and left lending parties.
The EU just needs to look at Brexit to have a warning about what happens when such issues are ignored. Brexit was multifaceted but one of the big issues was illegal migration, and the UK wasn’t even in the schengen zone so already had more control over it’s borders than other EU countries.
I don’t know what the solutions are, but the EU needs to work on this. Euro skepticism has gone quiet following Brexit but it’s likely to come back in other countries if its not addressed.
These two arent counter to each other really. The second is just impossible unless you build a police/military controlled wall along every border. You cant practically prevent immigration so arguing that freedom needs to be sacrificed for preventing immigration is a strawman.
Technically the problem is a really simple fix, but that would also mean going super racist: openly block anyone not looking white and European enough. Not hard to implement on a technical level because thats exactly what ai (and the average policeman) does unprompted, but it would be wildly discriminating. So probably exactly what the right wants.
