Leadership Quote by Gijs de Vries

Bureaucracy rarely announces itself as ideology, but de Vries comes close: the sentence is a soft-focus justification for a hard-edged project. “Has been created” is classic institutional passive voice, scrubbing away the political struggle that births any agency with coercive power. No lawmakers, no member states, no voters; just an entity that somehow arrives, fully formed, in Warsaw. The phrase makes the agency feel inevitable rather than chosen.

The declared intent is clean and technocratic: “help” and “cooperate” are comfort words, the kind that reassure publics anxious about both migration and sovereignty. Cooperation sounds like coordination, not control; assistance, not enforcement. Yet the subtext is about consolidating authority at Europe’s perimeter. A “Borders Agency” exists because national borders have become a shared problem: asylum flows, irregular migration routes, human trafficking, and the political pressure those issues generate. Cooperation is the palatable framing for operational integration: shared intelligence, joint patrols, common risk assessments, and the quiet standardization of who gets through and who doesn’t.

“in Warsaw” does additional work. It signals that Europe’s frontier politics are not abstract Brussels governance; they’re anchored closer to the EU’s eastern edge, where post-2004 enlargement sharpened questions about where “Europe” stops. Placing the institution there reads as both symbolic commitment and strategic positioning: the border is not just a line, it’s a theater.

De Vries, as a politician, is managing legitimacy. He’s selling border governance as administration, not as a moral or geopolitical choice. That’s precisely why the line is effective - and why it invites skepticism.