This project investigates what is perhaps the world's only artificially created migration crisis.
Since 2021, Belarus has been recruiting and then pushing migrants from the Middle East and North Africa across the border into the Polish forest, seemingly in an effort to destabilize the EU (in part by dividing people on immigration). These refugees face violence at the hands of Belarusian and Polish border guards, and sometimes die of dehydration or hypothermia in the dense and primeval forest.
Over the last four years, Poland has heavily militarized and fortified its border, yet migrants and smugglers have only found more inventive ways to cross.
