EU should offer members more help with migration, Polish president says

WARSAW (Reuters) -The European Union gives more support to countries outside the bloc like Turkey to help them deal with migration than it gives to its own members, the Polish president said on Friday.

The bloc's largest eastern member is opposed to an EU deal designed to share out the responsibility for looking after migrants and refugees and says the EU has done too little to help it deal with refugees. The EU rejects this criticism.

Warsaw plans to hold a referendum on whether to accept the deal.

"I don't understand why the European Commission and European institutions spent billions of euros to help Turkey when it took in a million Syrian migrants, but they were not willing to help Poland, which took in millions of refugees from Ukraine," Andrzej Duda told private broadcaster Radio Zet.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on Thursday that he would present a plan for "safe borders" in Brussels, calling for border agency Frontex to be reformed and for more funds for countries tasked with securing the EU's external borders.

The Polish government objects the EU migration deal saying it would be forced to either accept additional migrants on top of the 1.5-2.0 million refugees it estimates it has taken in from Ukraine, or pay other countries who take them in.

European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson told Polish private broadcaster TVN24 on Thursday that countries like Poland which face migration pressures would not be forced to accept additional migrants under the deal and would not have to make payments to other countries.

(Reporting by Alan Charlish, Pawel Florkiewicz, Marek Strzelecki; editing by Jason Neely)