At the end of 2022, Lena and I tried to cross the border from Ukraine on our way back to the Czech Republic and Lena was rejected at the Polish border in spite of having done everything right.
When our group fled to the Czech Republic, they were granted refugee status immediately. This originally came with some restrictions: namely, they wouldn’t be allowed to return to Ukraine without forfeiting their refugee visas and getting themselves restricted from returning to the Czech Republic. Since none of us had ever been refugees before, we had no idea that this is standard procedure in most countries for people who are fleeing violence in their home countries. When, two days after fleeing Ukraine, our group went and registered, none of us had a full appreciation of these restrictions. We were just grateful that for the moment, we didn’t have to worry about whether we would be able to stay or not until we figured out what to do next.
Our group had fled Ukraine in the first weeks of the war, when it was still unsure whether Ukraine would stand against the much larger and better armed Russian forces. Even when they fled, though, our group’s plan was to be in the Czech Republic for two weeks, and then go home.
I remember the looks of shocked defeat when a few weeks after being granted their status in CZ, our ladies learned that it may be years and a lot of legal wrangling for them to be able to go back and see their homes, their husbands, their friends and family.
Thankfully, the Czech Republic and most European countries changed their laws for Ukrainian refugees. But only for the Ukrainians. A Syrian refugee is still unable to visit their home. We recognize the injustice of this imbalance but are grateful for the freedom our friends have been granted.
When the war started, Ukrainians started fleeing Ukraine and flooding into EU countries like the Czech Republic. Those countries opened their borders, and in those first days, made adjustments to their immigration policies that allowed such a massive influx. As time has gone by, they have continued to make changes to make this influx more manageable and sustainable for the bureaucracy. This makes sense, as the Czech Republic has accepted nearly 500,000 Ukrainians, which increased the population within the country by about 5% in less than one year. That is a massive change, and there will a lot of things that have to do to make those population shifts work for everyone. But there are always problems that remain.
The “refugee visa” our friends were given was just a small, circular stamp in their passports, which is not the format of standard visas. In those early days, there was a large conference center that was set up to process incoming Ukrainians and get them this stamp in a very fast manner. Again, we were super grateful. While they waited in line, there was free food, toys that kids could take with them, and free SIM cards for phones set up with a limited first month package, and a lot more.
Later, the Czech system changed. One member of our group, Snizhana, came about a month after everyone else, and she received a standard multi entry visa.
None of them did anything more right or more wrong, it was just that about a month into the war, the Czech government changed their system. Snizhana benefitted, and everyone else was stuck with the refugee stamps. It was arbitrary. Inside of the Czech Republic, it didn’t matter, but we soon learned that outside of the country, the type of visa one had made a big difference.
This past summer, just a few months into the war, Lena went into Ukraine to see her husband. On the way in, the border guard looked at her stamp and said that this was the last time she’d be able to get through. Then, a friend of ours traveled into Ukraine, and when she tried to return to the Czech Republic with her American fiancé, the Polish border guards denied her entry. She had the stamp that the Czech government had given her, but the Polish officials wouldn’t recognize it as a visa. They were traveling by bus, so this created quite a problem. They ended up getting out of Ukraine via another country, but it took them several days more of travel, especially since they were traveling by bus. This story quickly made the rounds with all of our friends who had plans to travel into Ukraine. As time went on, we heard more and more stories like this.
Anya and Lena had plans to travel into Ukraine the next month, so they went to the foreign police office to inquire about their own visa stamps. After sharing the experience of their friend (and a few other stories of being turned away by the Polish border guards), they asked if they could get an actual visa or at least some documentation clarifying the stamp that they had received. They were assured by the Czech officials that the stamp they had was absolutely the same as the visa sticker others had. They was no difference between the two. When they pressed, the officials refused to give them anything more, and even harshly questioned them why they needed to go into Ukraine anyway, showing annoyance that they wanted to travel to spend time with family.
From what we have heard, the foreign police are not only very unhelpful, but have often been hostile to people who try and use their services. When Janna and I needed an invitation letter to be able to apply for a one-year visa as Americans, a local church offered to be the inviting entity that we needed. The pastor of that church had to travel to the foreign police three times to be able to get a registration number from them. Each time they were hostile towards this Czech man, and three times they wouldn’t help him with what he needed, making him return again and again.
After trying and failing to get a different form of visa, Lena and Anya both traveled into Ukraine twice. Each time, as they approached the border, they felt immense anxiety that they would be turned away. This is one of those times when my own privilege showed, because, when I was with them, I didn’t share their anxiety and in fact told them that they were being overly pessimistic. In November and early December, we got through. Back in November, I was with Lena and Zoya, and the border agent came around and asked what Lena’s work was in CZ. She told them she worked in a school, and the border agent accepted that, walked away and stamped all of our passports. In the beginning of December, Anya and I crossed and she didn’t get a single question.
On December 30th, Lena and I were leaving Ukraine once again. She had spent the week with her husband Vitalik and was heading back to be with her five year old daughter, Zoya. Lena, as usual, was worried, but I was convinced that we wouldn’t have any problems.
We were at the border a little after 6 AM because the lines are shortest early in the morning. In spite of this, the lines had been pretty long due to so many people traveling into Ukraine to be with family for the holidays, and we ended waiting two and a half hours before we got through the Ukrainian side of the border. We handed our passports to the Polish border agent and waited for him to process us. After a few minutes, he waved Lena to the window. He was unsure what to do with her because she had the stamp and not a regular visa. She had also been in the European Union for more than 90 days out of the last 180. Lena explained the way the Czech government was handling the Ukrainian refugees, and that she had gone to the foreign police about this specific issue. After hearing all of this the agent said that he was planning on letting her though, but first he just wanted to check with his supervisor.
The supervisor walked over, and after looking at her passport, said, “This isn’t a visa.” Lena once again explained what the Czech government had done, and her efforts to acquire something more. The Czech officials had assured her that this worked just like a visa.
The supervisor looked at her and patronizingly asked, “Do you know what a visa looks like?”
Lena took a breathe, “Yes.”
He then showed Lena her stamp, “Does this stamp look like a visa to you?”
After already explaining all of this twice, there wasn’t much more for Lena to say about this, so she pointed out that she had traveled out of Ukraine via Poland three times already. This stamp was being recognized as a visa. There was precedent. This caused the supervisor to ask why she kept traveling to Ukraine. “Because my husband is there. So are my parents and family.”
“Then why do you want to go back to the Czech Republic?”
“My five year old daughter is there waiting for me. Missing me.”
“Who is your daughter with?”
“A friend, but just for the week.”
To this the supervisor shrugged as if to say, “That’s enough, she’ll be fine without you.”
Lena again reiterated that she had been allowed through three times on her stamp, and this time the retort was, “Our government allowed you through those times on our generosity. We aren’t obligated to keep showing you that generosity.”
Lena asked if they could just let her through one more time. The Czech government was supposed to be issuing new visas at the start of the year. Just a few days away. Lena was trying to be in compliance with everyone; it just hadn’t been possible up to that point in the Czech Republic.
To this, the answer was that if he granted her passage, he could lose his job tomorrow (don’t spend time trying to understand that logic … unless you want to give yourself a headache just for the fun of it).
Somewhere in the middle of this, after realizing that this supervisor wasn’t gong to let her through, Lena started to cry, and he patronizingly asked her, “Ma’am, why are you crying?” When I heard all of this later, a part of me was glad and a part of me was mad that I had been in the car. I don’t know if I would have been able to keep my cool with his disdainful demeanor.
Finally, the back and forth was over. Lena had been rejected. The supervisor moved us forward to the customs control and while we waited for this agent to do her work, I approached the supervisor. I explained all that Lena had done to be in compliance, and that she had passed before many times as had other friends of ours who have the exact same situation and stamp. I said, “She did everything right, why can’t she go through?”
He didn’t look at me as I talked, but once I finished, he glanced at me and asked, “Who is she to you?”
“She’s a friend.”
“Then I don’t owe you an explanation.” And he looked away.
After waiting a few more minutes, he took our documents and walked ahead of the car through a gate to the return line to Ukraine. They had me park and took Lena inside of the customs office. She was in there for about 30 minutes. They filled out an official rejection of entry form, and the supervisor told her that she was lucky that they weren’t deporting her. Apparently, he hadn’t insulted her quite enough.
In the end, he recognized that she wasn’t at fault, but Poland was not obligated to honor the Czech Republic’s adjusting of their procedures to accommodate Ukrainians. I find this argument specious because they are neighboring countries in the Schengen Zone of the European Union. They do have an obligation to honor each others visa arrangements.
When Lena got back in the car, and we waited to go through Ukrainian passport control and customs again, she just cried. I put my hand on her shoulder and said it wasn’t fair.
At that point, we had to make a decision. Do we try to go to another Polish border crossing? The one that we usually crossed wasn’t too far and they had let us through before. But that was also the busiest border crossing. Getting in line there at almost 10 o’clock would mean waiting for 4 or more hours.
And, because Lena might now be in the system, she might get rejected again.
We decided to cross into another country. We found nearest border crossing into Slovakia which was the next country to the south. We were going to have to travel another 4 1/2 hours to get to that crossing, and repeat this. But we had heard that Slovakia was more cooperative with Ukrainians’ visas. We had to do a lot of backtracking, and then head off in a completely different direction, through the mountains of Ukraine. I was kicking myself for being over confident. If we had just gone this way to start, we would have been most of the way home already. As it turned out, we had to wait 3 hours at this Slovakian border crossing in the middle of nowhere because we arrived in the middle of the day. When we got to the agents there, they had a few questions for me, but no one had any questions for Lena. We were through without any problems.
We crossed just after 5 in the evening into Slovakia. I finally dropped Lena off at her apartment at 2 AM. We had spent 21 hours together in the car at that point.
Lena fled to Western Ukraine in the first days of the war with the rest of our group. After taking three days to travel what would normally have been an 7-8 hour trip, our friends regrouped and had to decide what to do. The men wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country. The women and kids didn’t want to leave husbands, fathers and brothers. But none of them felt safe, and eventually, after some friends of ours in the Czech Republic reached out and said that they wanted to help accept Ukrainian refugees, it was decided that the women and children would cross into the EU. When they crossed that border, Lena said that it was the first time she didn’t feel like she wasn’t going to die. But she still told herself that she would only be in the Czech Republic for a few weeks. Then the war would be over and she would go back.
Unfortunately, wars always last longer than people think.
Lena has done everything expected of her to integrate into Czech life. She is the most dedicated language student. She has had an official job since week 2. When our group finds out about some new requirement for Ukrainians, Lena is one of the first to comply. As I detailed earlier, she tried more than once to make sure that she would be able to meet the visa requirements for traveling back and forth to Ukraine. She has done everything she can to respect the Czech government and people who have granted her refuge. She is very grateful for the refuge she has received.
But Lena didn’t leave Ukraine to create a new life somewhere. She left because she feared for her life and the life of her daughter. She goes back to Ukraine as often as she can because that is where her life, her husband, her family and her future are. She just wants to go home. So do almost all of the refugees that I know.
As we neared the end of our long journey that day, I asked Lena if she was still planning on moving back to Ukraine this summer even if the war is ongoing. She said yes. There is the trauma of living through a war and there is the trauma of being a separated family. She would rather have the war trauma but be together. When I was asking, I was thinking about the missile that she had seen that flew less than a kilometer away from her and Vitalik in the car just the day before. She may have been thinking about not dealing with the fear of crossing the border never knowing for sure if they were going to let you through even though she is legal.
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Back when we were at the Polish border, and I was sitting in the car knowing that there was a good chance that the border guards wouldn’t allow Lena to go through, and seeing the emotional toll that this was taking on her, two things came to mind. The first was the many Ukrainians who tried to cross the border on a bus and were rejected. Most border crossings are miles from the nearest village, much less any towns. How would they get back to a city in order to get on another bus to try and cross at another point? How many days and how much cost would that add to their trip? Most of the Ukrainians that we know are barely getting by because the only work that they can find is immigrant work which comes with immigrant wages. Sabina, one of the girls in our group, had to save for months to be able to make the trip in to Ukraine to visit her husband. Lena’s journey was going to be easier simply because she had me in her corner. Her experience was unusually easy.
The other thing that crossed my mind was how incredibly difficult it had been for our own family to be able to get our visas. We ended up having to leave our people in the Czech Republic for three months while we waited for our visas to be approved. Anya, who was the lone adult with 7 kids, said that us leaving made her feel like a small child who was being orphaned. But there was nothing we could do to legally remain in the country, our time was up. So, we went back to the US and raised funds while we waited for our visa approval, which only came after we had returned to the Czech Republic.
Each time we presented somewhere, while in the States, I was honest that I did not want to be in the US at that time. I wanted to be with our people, helping. But we weren’t able to be where we wanted because we were dealing with the bureaucracy of the immigration system. That process took so much time. Janna had spent two months trying to get all the necessary documents in order. It was very clear that she would not have been able to finish our application without an enormous amount of help from people in the Czech Republic. It is practically impossible as a foreigner to do it on your own. Even if you read all the websites, the language is so difficult to understand that you still have no idea of the requirements. Even after two months of work, there were still things that were required from us after submitting our applications… things that weren’t on the official application list. Those documents that they required cost hundreds of dollars. In the end, we had to make two round trip flights for our whole family to the US. We had to spend three months in the US while we waiting for visas. We then flew back to Czechia because we were not given any kind of information about when our visas would be ready. We had heard up to 6 months. Then we had to fly back to Washington, DC to be able to pick up our visas. I don’t know how many thousands of dollars that we spent just to be able to help our group in Czechia. We did it all legally, and it took a huge toll on us.
The Czech system is significantly more simple than the US system, which is designed to make legal immigration nearly impossible, even if you have financial means and representation.
Immigration has been a polarizing topic in the US for the whole of my adult life, but it seems like the past few years have reached a fever pitch. Among conservative evangelicals, many seem to assume that it is the Christian position to be anti-immigrant. Go online and google “conservative evangelicals and immigration” and you will find all kinds of articles and studies examining this trend. The majority of articles point out how this position is more informed by political rhetoric and media consumption than Biblical theology. (I found an interesting one that examined how in countries where the church has a lot of political power, the people in those churches have an overwhelmingly anti-immigrant posture. In countries where the church has very little political power or influences, those Christians are overwhelmingly in favor of immigration. Let that sink in.)
In the middle of the debates and spouting of rhetoric, though, I rarely hear the stories of actual immigrants and refugees.
Lena’s experience happened in Europe, but the injustice of it is common to many immigrants and refugees. We’ve witnessed many of our friends endure long, drawn out struggles as they try and navigate systems that are designed to refuse them. Around the world, anti-immigrant rhetoric is on the rise, and that is making immigration systems more closed. The thing is, most people who are opposed to immigrants don’t know any immigrants. This leads to a dehumanizing effect. It isn’t Lena that someone is opposed to, its the stereotypes: the terrortists, rapist and murderers. And those stereotypes are themselves misinformation.
Before we make judgements, we should hear what it is like and how people are treated when they are just trying to live a normal life and move through the process legally. I believe that if we took the time to hear the stories of people like Lena instead of focusing on the rhetoric, we would be better informed, and more compassionate and humble.
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If you want to hear more perspectives when it comes to immigration, here are some things that I have found helpful.
Podcasts:
Revisionist History S3E5: General Chapman’s Last Stand
Holy Post Podcast: Episode 393 - Who moved my refugees?
Articles to read:
Did my family immigrate legally? - https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/did-my-family-really-come-legally-todays-immigration-laws-created-a-new-reality
How hard it is to legally immigrate? - https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/why-don’t-they-just-get-line
Immigrants and crime - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014704117
Positive economic impact of immigrants - https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/economic-and-fiscal-impact-of-immigration
Biblical thinking about immigration - https://evangelicalimmigrationtable.com/about/#PRINCIPLES
Understanding White evangelical views on immigration https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/understanding-white-evangelical-views-on-immigration/
Why white evangelicals are so hostile to immigration. https://www.vox.com/2018/10/30/18035336/white-evangelicals-immigration-nationalism-christianity-refugee-honduras-migrant
Republicans and white evangelicals are outliers in fear of immigrants invading U.S.
International study of religious attitudes towards immigration. https://blog.policy.manchester.ac.uk/posts/2017/11/does-religion-matter-for-attitudes-towards-immigration/#:~:text=Those%20who%20belong%20to%20majority,was%20associated%20with%20anti%2Dimmigration
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