FRANKFURT AN DER ODER, Germany—Before 25-year-old Abhishek Budhiraja leaves his dorm to go to campus, he pats down his pockets. “Phone, keys, wallet, headphones,” he says, running through his checklist. Recently, that list has grown longer: “Student ID, passport, residence permit.”

Today, like most other days, Budhiraja anticipates needing to prove his identity.

On the far side of a blue city bridge that connects Germany’s eastern border city of Frankfurt an der Oder to its twin city, Slubice, Poland, a group of border agents and police officers block the sidewalk. They wear bulletproof vests affixed with walkie-talkies, and hawkishly scan cars and pedestrians as they pass. A stream of morning commuters on foot walk by them without slowing their gait.

Budhiraja, who came to Germany in January 2024 on a student visa from India, is not among them. As he approaches Slubice, steps away from his university campus, five agents knowingly look at one another. A guard in military gear steps forward, voicing a rote command Budhiraja has long memorized.

A bearded man in glasses with a black jacket over a red hoodie sits in a bus seat.

Abhishek Budhiraja, an international student from India, rides the bus on his daily commute from his dorm in Frankfurt to his university’s branch campus in Slubice, Poland, on Oct. 7.

“It’s always like this. I’m getting stopped every day,” Budhiraja said afterward. Often, he’s stopped again on his reentry to Germany. “They just ask for my documents, and then they let me” pass.

Although Budhiraja’s university, Europa-Universität Viadrina, has buildings on both sides of the German-Polish border, it is a single entity—almost like the cities themselves. But that interdependence has become strained as growing anti-migration sentiment leads to tightened internal borders across the continent.

The Stadtbrücke bridge connecting the so-called twin cities was once the symbol of unity and free movement between Germany and Poland. Now, its symbolism is changing, as countries are reimposing internal borders at the risk of European unity. Over the summer, the bridge’s royal blue EU flags have been replaced by red and white Polish ones.

An old movie theater sign with missing letters so that it reads NO P AST. The edifice is covered with posters.

An old movie theater sign in Slubice, formerly eastern Germany, reads “No Past’” from its once “Kino Piast” on Oct. 7. It was named after the first Polish royal dynasty, the Piasts, during a comprehensive Polonization campaign carried out post-1945 after Poland acquired new territories from Germany.

The Schengen Agreement has long been seen as a defining achievement of the European Union. In 1985, it created a border-free region that’s grown to incorporate 29 countries between which people could travel, with no visa requirements or border controls.

The relationship between Frankfurt an der Oder in Germany and Slubice in Poland demonstrated Schengen’s potential. Unpoliced travel between the countries has been possible since the end of 2007, when Poland joined the Schengen Area. According to Sören Bollmann, the leader of the Frankfurt-Slubice Cooperation Center, that means as many as 20,000 people cross the bridge between the two cities each day, to work, attend university, send their kids to daycare, and grocery shop,

But the two cities have now become a symbol of the Schengen zone’s limits. For as long as the Schengen Agreement has been in place, nations have had the right to reintroduce border controls for national security. Those controls are nominally limited to a period of six months, with a maximum limit of two years. Prior to 2015, temporary border controls had only been reinstated 35 times by member states in the span of nearly a decade. Those instances were mostly one-off sporting events, or presidential visits.

Then came the European migration crisis. In the summer of 2015, more than 1 million people fleeing war and instability in the Middle East sought asylum in Europe. Then-Chancellor Angela Merkel opened up Germany to the largest share, most of them Syrian.

The same year, Germany was the first country to re-patrol its borders to stem a “big influx of persons seeking international protection,” as official EU communications put it, specifically at Austrian land borders. Ten years later, partial controls at the Bavarian border with Austria are still in place—and spreading. In 2024, the federal minister of the interior at the time, Nancy Faeser, ratcheted up controls to include all of Germany’s land borders in a stated effort to “reduce irregular migration further, stop migrant smugglers and criminals, and detect Islamists before they can do any harm.”

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According to migration policy experts, Germany has created a precedent for permissibly breaking EU law by maintaining its border controls well past the regulation’s limits. “When Germany, as the strongest and richest country in the European Union, is openly disregarding the regulations, this is a clear signal to others that ‘OK, we can do the same,’ because Germany will not stop us,” said Norbert Cyrus, a social anthropologist specializing in irregular migration at the Viadrina. “Then, you have this domino effect.”

Indeed, Austria, Slovenia, France, Sweden, and Norway followed Germany’s lead in 2015, introducing new border inspections that in almost all cases remain in effect. Ten years later, European countries continue to expand and prolong their border checks. As of October 2025, the European Commission has recorded 481 notifications of temporary reintroductions, including a large share from COVID-19. Currently, countries including Poland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Denmark have also implemented internal border controls.

Two years ago, Germany introduced partial border checks at Frankfurt an der Oder for cars and foot traffic coming from Poland as part of a nationwide crackdown on migration. In July, Poland followed suit and reinstated its own partial controls at border crossings with Lithuania and Germany.

Many residents in Frankfurt an der Oder worry that these temporary controls will quietly become permanent. “The risk is that [we] get used to it,” said Bollmann, who has lived in the city for 25 years. “Lots of people are starting to think that it’s normal.”

Police offers stand next to a van at the entrance to a bridge.

German police patrol pedestrians entering Frankfurt an der Oder from Poland on Oct. 7.

There are other residents, however, who welcome internal border controls as the new normal. On the bridge in the no-man’s-land between Germany and Poland, pictures of Frankfurt an der Oder mayoral candidate Wilko Möller were everywhere in late September. In campaign posters hung on beams across the bridge, the grey-haired politician was pointing at the camera under a message reading, “For Germany, because of you.” In another, he stood with his hands clasped, looking straight ahead, under the message, “Safety belongs in professional hands.”

Möller was a candidate with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has gained a significant foothold in the country over the last decade. Immigration has become a core mobilizing theme of the AfD, whose party leaders seized on a handful of violent attacks perpetrated by asylum seekers in Germany in 2024 and early 2025—plus an influx of Ukrainians in Germany—to campaign on the need for a safer country with tougher controls.

During the last federal elections in February, the AfD garnered 20 percent of the vote and became Germany’s second-strongest political force. In Frankfurt an der Oder, Möller also came in second place in its mayoral election earlier this month. But although his campaign failed, the constituency it represents remains influential.

Before Poland reinstated its border patrol agents, vigilante groups of Polish nationalists gathered in Slubice for months this summer. They attempted citizen arrests of people they deemed suspicious, and spread false claims that Germany was sending thousands of illegal migrants to Poland, locals said.

In fact, between May and July 2025, the German Federal Police turned away close to 12,500 people at border crossings nationwide. The majority (76 percent) were rejected at the border “in connection with illegal border crossing.” Cyrus said that figure includes EU citizens who could have been turned back at the border for an innocent reason, like forgetting their passport.

An officer in a red beret stands next to an open white van with Polish lettering on it. A person in a yellow reflective vest stands at right. Cars drove along the street and buildings and Polish flags are seen in the distance.

Polish border patrol agents check an incoming van at the Slubice border crossing on Oct. 7.

How much do border checks influence residents’ lives? As a practical matter, they are mostly inconvenient. Residents lament that they must now remember to bring their passports across the bridge and afford themselves extra time commuting. But the new measures have a deeper significance as well.

Slubice’s deputy mayor, Tomasz Stefanski, told Foreign Policy that the controls “don’t have sense.” They conflict with sentiments on the ground. “They can’t imagine in Warsaw or Berlin … that we are one city, with two parts,” he said. And neither of those parts had a problem with migrants passing through the border: “They don’t know the real situation here,” he added.

In fact, many residents see border controls as evidence of their diminished rights as Europeans. “For me, it’s crazy because I grew up without borders,” said Ira Helten, a student member of the presidential council at the Viadrina. The backslide to regular border checks is hardest to swallow for residents who lived through the transition to a border-free Germany.

“It hurts more, because we know what we’re giving up,” Bollmann said. “Frankfurt-Slubice without the European integration project would be a very sad place.”

Ironically, the people most burdened by inconsistent border checks also have the greatest tolerance for them, Helten said. A large portion of the university’s non-European international students are from countries familiar with border controls.

“Border controls are not an issue,” Budhiraja said with a chronic smile. He just wishes they were evenly applied to everyone. “But when you are in a hurry and suddenly someone stops you and asks for your documents, and 10 others pass in front of you, it’s like: What did I do? I’m just walking.”