Poland tightens eastern border as new outpost of EU

The dense forests of this border area make a perfect cover for illegal migrants coming from the east.

Poland is bracing itself. It will soon become an outpost of the expanding European Union.

Last summer, a native American unit of the US Customs Service helped train Polish border guards to spot the telltale signs of crossings along the "green border" - broken twigs and branches, overturned rocks.

"Everyone wants to get in, legally or not," says Wojciech Woloch, an officer with the Polish Border Guard at Terespol. "A lot of people now see Poland as a stepping stone to other places in the EU. Patrolling is a lot tougher than it used to be, but I think we're ready with the equipment and increased staff."

Under pressure from current EU members to seal their eastern borders, Poland and seven other Central European countries that will join the union this May are cracking down to stem the flow of illegal migrants from Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia as well as from regions further afield.

They're rolling out high-tech border controls and strict visa requirements for neighboring lands. Otherwise, the EU says, drug, weapons and human smugglers from Central Asia and elsewhere will find an easy back door into Western Europe.

Over the past two years, the native American Shadow Wolves unit has also trained border guards in Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia in an effort to help these new EU members.

Yet as a result of the increased border vigilance, the EU newcomers are shutting out border regions that share close family and trade ties. What's more, the effort could end up encouraging would-be migrants to take an illegal route to the EU.

"I used to drive to Poland every week to make money for my family, and it was no problem," says Stanislav K. "Now I couldn't even get a visa at the embassy. There's no work for us in Belarus, so what are we to do?"

Just before Christmas, he and two friends - natives of Brest, a city across the Bug River from Terespol - raised nearly $500 from families, friends, and their own savings, and paid a smuggler to help them get across. Now the trio is working in Poland, helping to renovate a Warsaw estate.

"We realize that even with visas, the flow from the east will be difficult to stop," says Jan Wegrzyn, a director in the Polish Interior Ministry.

"Whatever visa requirement or detection device we introduce, foreigners will always find a way around it ... nevertheless, we have to meet the standards of the EU."

EU officials stress that higher standards are necessary before candidate countries can join Schengen, a security system that has lifted internal border controls throughout most of the EU. While travel within the union is mostly passport-free under the Schengen agreement, movement into the EU is strictly controlled. For new member states, tight restrictions for local cross-border trade are also mandated.

For all countries about to join, that's meant a rush to revamp equipment, retrain personnel, and introduce new rules - while struggling to maintain relations with their non-EU neighbors next door.

At Terespol, the largest passenger crossing between Poland and Belarus, border guards self-consciously display brand-new night-vision goggles, mobile heat-sensor units, machines that scan the contents of vehicles, and cameras that can detect a person hiding in a dark place or at night.

Indeed, the EU is pouring hundreds of millions of euros into bringing its new eastern frontier up to snuff, from Slovenia down south to Estonia in the north. It will spend $184 million over the next three years on Hungary alone, helping that country to tighten its borders with four countries that have been left out of the union, at least for now.

Poland, with an almost 800-mile-long eastern border lined with forests, lakes and mountains, is among the EU's greatest security concerns as May nears.

"Are we nervous? Of course we are," says an EU official, who declined to be named.

"Just look at a map," says the official. "There are hundreds of miles of unmanned territory in Poland alone, areas with dense woods to hide in. For smugglers of any kind, this is paradise. And countries to the east - Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Moldova - they have a bad reputation for illegal migration already, even before the EU expands."

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