EUROPE-IS-US: FarRight

R.M. Westerink; October 2026

Europe is receiving fewer asylum seekers than at any time in the past five years.
Irregular border crossings are down roughly 90 percent from the 2015 peak. And yet anti-immigration parties have never been stronger. In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD has just won a state election.

Immigration is shrinking. The politics of immigration is growing. Something has come loose.

The Italian think tank ISPI puts it plainly: European migration policy "increasingly appears to operate independently of migration trends themselves." The debate has become a machine that keeps running whether or not there is anything to feed it.

This essay is about that machine: how it works, how it ran its course in the United States, why it is still running here, and what it costs us. It is written for the Welcomers among us, and it carries an uncomfortable message.

The short version: Europe’s Welcomers have fixed half of their blind spot. The other half keeps the machine running. And while it runs, Europe is losing time it does not have.

How the machine works

The machine needs only two things. The first is a real, practical problem that people experience and that those in charge do not solve. The second is a way of talking about that problem that makes it impossible to raise without being called a bigot. Put the two together and you get a field of unanswered grievance. Someone will always step in to claim it.

Call the two camps what they are.
The Welcomers see receiving refugees as a moral identity and a duty.
The Gatekeepers see controlled, limited and orderly immigration as the precondition of a functioning state.

Both camps have the same bad habit: they judge motives instead of arguments. To Welcomers, Gatekeepers are xenophobes. To Gatekeepers, Welcomers are naïve idealists, or worse. Each side has its alibi for not listening. This essay is about the Welcomers’ version, because that is the one Welcomers can fix.

America: the machine at full power

Until around 2020, the American debate was mostly a quarrel about motives. "Kids in cages" on one side, "open borders" on the other. Then the numbers arrived. Between 2021 and 2025, U.S. border authorities recorded more than 8 million encounters at the southern border. Shelters filled up. Asylum courts fell years behind. Cities far from the border, like New York and Chicago, struggled to house the new arrivals.

This is where both Welcomer blind spots showed.

The numbers blind spot. The asylum system had a capacity, and the inflow exceeded it. For too long, many Welcomers treated that as a detail, or even as a reason to loosen the rules further. A moral stance turned into an operational failure that everyone could see.

The alibi blind spot. Because resistance to immigration had been defined as a moral failing, Welcomers had no language left for the practical problem. Admitting it felt like giving in to xenophobia. "They are bigots" became a reason not to look.

The Biden administration did change course, eventually.
It restricted asylum above a daily threshold, backed a bipartisan border bill and expanded legal routes. But the turn came late. By 2024, immigration was Trump’s strongest issue and Harris’s weakest. Trump did not invent his immigration theme. The Welcomers handed him the material: a crisis they would not measure and a grievance they would not let be spoken.

What happened next is instructive, though not in a comfortable way. Crossings fell to historic lows. Enforcement under Trump went too far for many Americans. And public support for immigration rebounded, to 79 percent.

It would be convenient to read this as proof that Welcomers who learn their lesson can switch the machine off. The American story does not prove that. It proves something more modest, and still important, just that the machine cán stop. When the practical problem disappears from people’s daily lives, the grievance loses its power and opinion swings back.

Europe: the numbers fell, the machine kept running

Now look at Europe.
Here, the practical problem has largely shrunk. Asylum applications and irregular crossings are falling year after year. By the American logic, the machine should be slowing down. It is not. Governments are still competing on strictness, outsourcing asylum procedures and building processing centers in Albania, while arrivals keep falling.

Two things keep it running.

Twenty-seven arenas instead of one. In the United States, one federal government owned the problem and could be judged on it. When the numbers fell, everyone could see it. Europe has twenty-seven national arenas, each with its own elections and its own Gatekeeper parties. Brussels manages the rules, but nobody owns the result. Falling numbers at European level do not register as a success anywhere in particular.

The EU’s Migration and Asylum Pact was presented as the answer to the far right. The far right was not impressed. Anti-immigration parties grew from 18 percent of the European Parliament in 2019 to 26 percent in 2024, and Poland’s prime minister threatened not to implement the pact at all. In Europe, the grievance does not get resolved. It moves around.

The alibi survives. European Welcomers have learned the first lesson. Nearly every mainstream party now accepts that migration must be limited and controlled. In the Netherlands, GroenLinks-PvdA campaigns for "effective and humane" asylum policy.

But the second lesson has not landed. When AfD voters, Rassemblement National voters, or residents of a village with a new asylum center voice their worries, the reflex is still to explain those worries away: as prejudice, as manipulation, as fear stoked by others.
The numbers blind spot has been cured. The alibi has not.

That is the real difference with America. There, once the numbers fell the machine ran dry. In Europe, our fragmented politics keeps the grievance in circulation without needing the numbers.
What keeps it alive is the gap the alibi leaves: concerns that are heard but never answered.

That gap is the one part of the machine the Welcomers control. It is also the one part they have not yet repaired.

Fighting the last war

The issue matters far beyond migration, because migration is not the question that decides Europe’s future:

• Defense: rearmament, Ukraine, the eastern flank, credible deterrence.

• Economic power: competitiveness, technology, energy.

• Unity: whether Europe can act as one when it has to.

Each of these requires exactly what the migration debate keeps using up: political attention, trust between member states, and voters who believe Europe works for them.

Look at what migration does to European politics today. It crowds summit agendas. It sets member states against each other: frontline states against destination states, east against west. It has brought back border checks inside the Schengen area, one of the most tangible things Europe ever gave its citizens. And election after election, it pushes voters toward parties that distrust the very European cooperation on which defense and economic strength depend.

A wedge, Europe keeps driving into itself. Every election fought over migrants rather than over Europe’s place in the world is an election in which the questions that will decide our future go unasked and unanswered.
Welcomers who keep migration at the center of their identity are fighting the last war. Without meaning to, they help keep the wedge in place.

From Welcomers to Europeans

This is what the title means. It is not a call to give up humanitarian principle. It asks Welcomers to move their identity: away from a single issue, and toward the European agenda on which a humane migration policy itself depends. Two commitments follow.

Europe first. A humane migration policy can only be built by a Europe that exists as a political actor. Defense, economic strength and unity are where Europe’s future will be decided. Migration should become what it can be: a well-run, shared and largely technical file, like fisheries or customs. Something Europe handles, not something Europe fights about.

Closing the alibi gap. The American lesson cuts both ways. Support for a generous policy returns when people believe the system is under control. And that trust is built in the street, not in Brussels.
Housing shortages, full classrooms, disorder in public spaces, the sense that rules apply to some and not to others: these are not prejudices to be deconstructed but governance problems to be solved.

Picture a town where a new reception center is announced.
In one version, residents who raise concerns at the town meeting are told they are being manipulated.
In the other, they leave with a named contact person, an extra teacher for the local school paid from a European fund, and a date on which the municipality will report back. Only the second version builds the trust that Europe needs for everything else.

The two commitments fit together: calm and technical at European level, visible and practical at street level. The solidarity mechanisms of the Migration Pact are a start. They should grow into a standing, funded instrument that makes "Europe protects" something people can see in their own village, and not just at the border.

One discipline belongs to both commitments: stop disqualifying the other side.
The Welcomer reflex of seeing every restrictionist as morally suspect mirrors the Gatekeeper reflex of seeing every humanitarian as a traitor. Both are alibis. Both make problems undiscussable and opponents unreachable. A politics that wants to remove the wedge has to stop speaking its language.

The wedge only works on a divided Europe

The United States showed that the machine can stop. It stopped when the practical problem went away. Europe has the falling numbers, yet the machine keeps running. Our fragmented politics keeps the grievance in circulation, and the Welcomers’ alibi keeps it unanswered.
The numbers will not save us this time. Closing the alibi gap might.

Meanwhile, the questions that really matter have little to do with migration.
Europe’s ability to defend itself, to compete and to act as one is being decided now. Every round of Welcomers against Gatekeepers uses up attention, trust and unity that this agenda cannot spare.

From Welcomers to Europeans means this. Keep the humane conviction. Drop the single-issue identity. Make Europe’s future the first priority, and earn the mandate for it by taking seriously what people experience where they live.

The wedge only works on a divided Europe.
Our closing task as Welcomers is to make ourselves, as a separate identity, unnecessary.