Poland has taken in 1.4 million Ukrainians, but EU leaders have refused to take that into account amid tensions over proposed immigrant quotas, Polish MEP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski has said.

In an interview published on the polskatimes.pl website, Saryusz-Wolski said: “Poland has delivered its share of solidarity, and more, because we have taken in a total of 1.4 million Ukrainians, including a million after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

He added: “We have urged that immigrants from the East should be taken into account in the total together with immigrants from the South, but we have been refused this.”

Poland has refused to accept any migrants from states under pressure in the EU’s migration crisis under an EU programme to relocate some 160,000 of more than two million migrants who have fled to camps in Italy and Greece from the war-torn Middle East and Africa since 2015.

Earlier this month the European Commission launched legal cases against Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic over their refusal to accept migrants.

Polish authorities have argued that the migrants do not want to stay in Poland and that relocation does not resolve the migrant crisis, suggesting instead that aid to the countries of origin would be more successful.

‘Not adaptable to our customs’

Saryusz-Wolski said: “We cannot agree to a situation in which we deliver our share of - so to speak - solidarity, arising from geography and geopolitics, and in addition take in migrants from the South, who in turn we know are either not assimilable, not adaptable to our customs, culture and laws, or resistant to adapting, and some of them pose a threat.

“On this question one can have an absolutely clear conscience. Including in moral terms.”

He added according to the latest Europol data, five “jihadists” were detained in Poland in 2016.

Migration and terrorism

“As for the phenomenon of migration and terrorism, there is an obvious link between the two. Often, in the name of political correctness, western left-liberal elites, politicians and the media in particular deny this," Saryusz-Wolski said.

“On the other hand, the heads of intelligence services in Germany and other countries speak openly about this.”

He added: “If you accept... that there is a connection between the two phenomena, and look at how destabilizing the presence of immigrants in France is, for example, in Calais, the policy of not accepting immigrants from the South is justified.

(pk)

Source: polskatimes.pl