FRANKFURT AN DER ODER, Germany—Earlier than 25-year-old Abhishek Budhiraja leaves his dorm to go to campus, he pats down his pockets. “Cellphone, keys, pockets, headphones,” he says, working via his guidelines. Just lately, that checklist has grown longer: “Scholar ID, passport, residence allow.”
Immediately, like most different days, Budhiraja anticipates needing to show his id.
On the far aspect of a blue metropolis bridge that connects Germany’s japanese border metropolis of Frankfurt an der Oder to its twin metropolis, Slubice, Poland, a gaggle of border brokers and law enforcement officials block the sidewalk. They put on bulletproof vests affixed with walkie-talkies, and hawkishly scan vehicles and pedestrians as they go. A stream of morning commuters on foot stroll by them with out slowing their gait.
Budhiraja, who got here to Germany in January 2024 on a pupil visa from India, isn’t amongst them. As he approaches Slubice, steps away from his college campus, 5 brokers knowingly take a look at each other. A guard in army gear steps ahead, voicing a rote command Budhiraja has lengthy memorized.
Abhishek Budhiraja, a world pupil from India, rides the bus on his each day commute from his dorm in Frankfurt to his college’s department campus in Slubice, Poland, on Oct. 7.
“It’s all the time like this. I’m getting stopped day-after-day,” Budhiraja mentioned afterward. Typically, he’s stopped once more on his reentry to Germany. “They only ask for my paperwork, after which they let me” go.
Though Budhiraja’s college, Europa-Universität Viadrina, has buildings on each side of the German-Polish border, it’s a single entity—nearly just like the cities themselves. However that interdependence has grow to be strained as rising anti-migration sentiment results in tightened inside borders throughout the continent.
The Stadtbrücke bridge connecting the so-called twin cities was as soon as the image of unity and free motion between Germany and Poland. Now, its symbolism is altering, as nations are reimposing inside borders on the threat of European unity. Over the summer season, the bridge’s royal blue EU flags have been changed by crimson and white Polish ones.
An previous movie show check in Slubice, previously japanese Germany, reads “No Previous’” from its as soon as “Kino Piast” on Oct. 7. It was named after the primary Polish royal dynasty, the Piasts, throughout a complete Polonization marketing campaign carried out post-1945 after Poland acquired new territories from Germany.
The Schengen Settlement has lengthy been seen as a defining achievement of the European Union. In 1985, it created a border-free area that’s grown to include 29 nations between which individuals may journey, with no visa necessities or border controls.
The connection between Frankfurt an der Oder in Germany and Slubice in Poland demonstrated Schengen’s potential. Unpoliced journey between the nations has been potential because the finish of 2007, when Poland joined the Schengen Space. In keeping with Sören Bollmann, the chief of the Frankfurt-Slubice Cooperation Middle, which means as many as 20,000 folks cross the bridge between the 2 cities every day, to work, attend college, ship their children to daycare, and grocery store,
However the two cities have now grow to be a logo of the Schengen zone’s limits. For so long as the Schengen Settlement has been in place, nations have had the suitable to reintroduce border controls for nationwide safety. These controls are nominally restricted to a interval of six months, with a most restrict of two years. Previous to 2015, short-term border controls had solely been reinstated 35 occasions by member states within the span of practically a decade. These cases had been largely one-off sporting occasions, or presidential visits.
Then got here the European migration disaster. In the summertime of 2015, greater than 1 million folks fleeing battle and instability within the Center East sought asylum in Europe. Then-Chancellor Angela Merkel opened up Germany to the biggest share, most of them Syrian.
The identical yr, Germany was the primary nation to re-patrol its borders to stem a “huge inflow of individuals looking for worldwide safety,” as official EU communications put it, particularly at Austrian land borders. Ten years later, partial controls on the Bavarian border with Austria are nonetheless in place—and spreading. In 2024, the federal minister of the inside on the time, Nancy Faeser, ratcheted up controls to incorporate all of Germany’s land borders in a acknowledged effort to “scale back irregular migration additional, cease migrant smugglers and criminals, and detect Islamists earlier than they’ll do any hurt.”
Learn Extra
-
Demonstrators wave German flags with the writing WE ARE THE PEOPLE as folks protest towards the rising value of residing in an illustration organized by the right-wing Different for Germany (AfD) political celebration on October 8, 2022 in Berlin, Germany. Demonstrators wave German flags with the writing WE ARE THE PEOPLE as folks protest towards the rising value of residing in an illustration organized by the right-wing Different for Germany (AfD) political celebration on October 8, 2022 in Berlin, Germany. The Far Proper Is Successful Europe’s Immigration Debate
Mainstream events are adopting more and more radical positions—at their very own expense.
-
An armed Libyan coast guardsman stands on a ship after the interception of 147 migrants making an attempt to succeed in Europe close to the coastal city of Zawiyah on June 27, 2017. An armed Libyan coast guardsman stands on a ship after the interception of 147 migrants making an attempt to succeed in Europe close to the coastal city of Zawiyah on June 27, 2017. The West’s Obsession With Border Safety Is Breeding Instability
Within the title of preventing unlawful immigration, the EU, the US, and Australia are emboldening authoritarian regimes, fueling abuses and corruption, and stoking intolerance at residence.
In keeping with migration coverage consultants, Germany has created a precedent for permissibly breaking EU regulation by sustaining its border controls effectively previous the regulation’s limits. “When Germany, because the strongest and richest nation within the European Union, is overtly disregarding the laws, it is a clear sign to others that ‘OK, we are able to do the identical,’ as a result of Germany is not going to cease us,” mentioned Norbert Cyrus, a social anthropologist specializing in irregular migration on the Viadrina. “Then, you’ve got this domino impact.”
Certainly, Austria, Slovenia, France, Sweden, and Norway adopted Germany’s lead in 2015, introducing new border inspections that in nearly all circumstances stay in impact. Ten years later, European nations proceed to broaden and lengthen their border checks. As of October 2025, the European Fee has recorded 481 notifications of short-term reintroductions, together with a big share from COVID-19. At the moment, nations together with Poland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Denmark have additionally applied inside border controls.
Two years in the past, Germany launched partial border checks at Frankfurt an der Oder for vehicles and foot site visitors coming from Poland as a part of a nationwide crackdown on migration. In July, Poland adopted swimsuit and reinstated its personal partial controls at border crossings with Lithuania and Germany.
Many residents in Frankfurt an der Oder fear that these short-term controls will quietly grow to be everlasting. “The chance is that [we] get used to it,” mentioned Bollmann, who has lived within the metropolis for 25 years. “Plenty of individuals are beginning to assume that it’s regular.”
German police patrol pedestrians coming into Frankfurt an der Oder from Poland on Oct. 7.
There are different residents, nevertheless, who welcome inside border controls as the brand new regular. On the bridge within the no-man’s-land between Germany and Poland, photos of Frankfurt an der Oder mayoral candidate Wilko Möller had been in every single place in late September. In marketing campaign posters held on beams throughout the bridge, the grey-haired politician was pointing on the digital camera below a message studying, “For Germany, due to you.” In one other, he stood together with his arms clasped, trying straight forward, below the message, “Security belongs in skilled arms.”
Möller was a candidate with the far-right Different for Germany (AfD), which has gained a big foothold within the nation during the last decade. Immigration has grow to be a core mobilizing theme of the AfD, whose celebration leaders seized on a handful of violent assaults perpetrated by asylum seekers in Germany in 2024 and early 2025—plus an inflow of Ukrainians in Germany—to marketing campaign on the necessity for a safer nation with harder controls.
Over the past federal elections in February, the AfD garnered 20 p.c of the vote and have become Germany’s second-strongest political drive. In Frankfurt an der Oder, Möller additionally got here in second place in its mayoral election earlier this month. However though his marketing campaign failed, the constituency it represents stays influential.
Earlier than Poland reinstated its border patrol brokers, vigilante teams of Polish nationalists gathered in Slubice for months this summer season. They tried citizen arrests of individuals they deemed suspicious, and unfold false claims that Germany was sending hundreds of unlawful migrants to Poland, locals mentioned.
Actually, between Could and July 2025, the German Federal Police turned away near 12,500 folks at border crossings nationwide. The bulk (76 p.c) had been rejected on the border “in reference to unlawful border crossing.” Cyrus mentioned that determine consists of EU residents who may have been turned again on the border for an harmless cause, like forgetting their passport.
Polish border patrol brokers verify an incoming van on the Slubice border crossing on Oct. 7.
How a lot do border checks affect residents’ lives? As a sensible matter, they’re largely inconvenient. Residents lament that they need to now bear in mind to deliver their passports throughout the bridge and afford themselves additional time commuting. However the brand new measures have a deeper significance as effectively.
Slubice’s deputy mayor, Tomasz Stefanski, instructed International Coverage that the controls “don’t have sense.” They battle with sentiments on the bottom. “They will’t think about in Warsaw or Berlin … that we’re one metropolis, with two elements,” he mentioned. And neither of these elements had an issue with migrants passing via the border: “They don’t know the true state of affairs right here,” he added.
Actually, many residents see border controls as proof of their diminished rights as Europeans. “For me, it’s loopy as a result of I grew up with out borders,” mentioned Ira Helten, a pupil member of the presidential council on the Viadrina. The backslide to common border checks is hardest to swallow for residents who lived via the transition to a border-free Germany.
“It hurts extra, as a result of we all know what we’re giving up,” Bollmann mentioned. “Frankfurt-Slubice with out the European integration undertaking can be a really unhappy place.”
Satirically, the folks most burdened by inconsistent border checks even have the best tolerance for them, Helten mentioned. A big portion of the college’s non-European worldwide college students are from nations accustomed to border controls.
“Border controls should not a problem,” Budhiraja mentioned with a continual smile. He simply needs they had been evenly utilized to everybody. “However when you’re in a rush and all of a sudden somebody stops you and asks on your paperwork, and 10 others go in entrance of you, it’s like: What did I do? I’m simply strolling.”
