When Russian tanks rolled toward Kyiv in 2022, it wasn’t Brussels or Berlin that held Europe together. It was Poland. Within days, a nation of 38 million absorbed more than a million Ukrainian refugees, not through theatrical gestures or bureaucratic paralysis, but through quiet competence. At train stations, volunteers waited with blankets; at the border, order reigned. While much of Europe performed compassion, Poland practiced it, proving empathy only survives when coupled with control.
It was decency at scale: swift, disciplined, unadvertised. And it remains the rare example in free governments of how mercy can coexist with sovereignty. Today, Poland still shelters roughly one million Ukrainian war refugees, all granted legal status, work rights, and healthcare under its 2022 Special Assistance Law. That moral line — strict at the frontier, generous at the heart — is one too many capitals have lost.
Tragically, Washington has begun to lose it too. As the war in Ukraine rages into its fourth year, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has suspended new applications for the Uniting for Ukraine program while conducting an internal review of its “effectiveness and long-term viability.”
According to Visit Ukraine Today and the Ukraine Task Force, the decision leaves thousands of Ukrainians in limbo while USCIS “reviews the program’s implementation and impact.”
What began as a humanitarian success — safely admitting more than 170,000 vetted Ukrainians since 2022 — now risks becoming a bureaucratic retreat. A lawful, secure, privately sponsored system has been frozen precisely when it is most needed.
A country that demands strong borders should not lose sight of why those borders exist. It can be vigilant at its frontiers and still humane toward the truly displaced. Poland offers the template. When Belarus, acting as Moscow’s proxy, funneled migrants from Iraq and Syria toward the EU in 2021, Warsaw built a 116-kilometer steel barrier, deployed troops, and refused to yield. Brussels denounced it for “pushbacks”; Berlin scolded it for lacking compassion. But Poland’s policy was not anti-human, it was anti-blackmail. It separated war victims from opportunists weaponized by autocrats.
The arithmetic vindicates the clarity. Poland’s homicide rate is 0.68 per 100,000, one of Europe’s lowest, according to Eurostat. Foreigners make up under 5 percent of inmates; in Germany, over 30 percent. As for Islamist terrorism, there was none in Poland in 2023 even as there were three attacks in Germany, according to Europol’s 2025 Terrorism Situation and Trend Report. Poland absorbed over a million refugees without crime waves, riots, or moral collapse.
Germany, by contrast, stands as the cautionary mirror, the experiment Poland refused to replicate. A decade after former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s famous statement of “Wir schaffen das,” or “We can handle this,” the costs are visible. In 2023, German police logged 5.94 million crimes, a 5.5 percent rise; foreigners accounted for 41 percent of suspects while comprising only 15 percent of the population, according to the Federal Criminal Police Office. Knife attacks in Solingen, a murdered police officer in Mannheim, riots across North Rhine — each has been described as anomalous, but all are symptoms of drift. Germany blurred the line between moral duty and moral vanity; Poland kept it.
Poland’s refusal to admit unvetted migrants from the Middle East or Africa was not hostility but foresight. It understood that compassion, to endure, must discriminate between the desperate and the deceitful. By 2025, its terror index remains zero, its public order intact, and its electorate — 70 percent of whom back strict enforcement — overwhelmingly supportive. Prime Minister Donald Tusk, hardly a nationalist, put it plainly: “Poland has already taken more genuine refugees than any EU member; we will not accept those forced upon us.” Brussels may threaten fines under the EU Migration and Asylum Pact, but Warsaw has something richer: moral coherence.
America once possessed that same geometry. Under Donald Trump, immigration followed a sequence that seemed severe but worked: legality first, merit second, compassion third. It was mocked as harsh yet functioned as sanity. Enforcement deterred exploitation; deterrence protected space for the truly endangered. The system’s morality lay in its order. Today that order is eroding. Washington’s paralysis over Ukrainian parole and the continuing freeze on Uniting for Ukraine illustrate the inversion perfectly: a nation capable of vetting and welcoming the worthy instead suspends them. Poland proved structure enables mercy; America mistakes hesitation for strength.
Poland’s restraint is not fear, it’s foresight. A nation twice erased from the map does not treat borders as abstractions. Its vigilance is the price of its survival. And that vigilance has bought what Western Europe has squandered: the ability to distinguish between the desperate and the deceitful, between refuge and intrusion.
That is the clarity America has misplaced. The United States can enforce its laws with the same iron discipline Poland shows at its frontiers — but it must also remember why those laws exist. They are not there to harden the heart; they are there to protect the space in which compassion can still mean something. A border is not a wall against pity; it’s the line that gives pity its purpose.
The paradox is simple. Poland guards its sovereignty and, in doing so, preserves its soul. America guards its virtue and risks losing both. To lead again, it must recover the moral geometry Poland has kept intact — mercy framed by order, strength guided by conscience. Because in the end, it isn’t the open door or the closed gate that defines a nation, it’s whether it still knows why either matters.