Europe has been struggling for years to limit the number of unauthorized migrants entering by land and sea, instituting increasingly tough policies. Those moves now appear to be working, with the numbers of migrants crossing into European Union countries decreasing dramatically from highs last year.
But despite the decline in migrant arrivals, anti-immigrant sentiment is flourishing, with leaders adopting or considering harsher policies that mainstream political parties would have balked at just a few years ago.
As in the United States, the steep drop in border crossings has done little to diminish the political potency of the issue.
In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is trying to send migrants rescued in the Mediterranean to Albania. Germany, one of the most welcoming countries during the wave of migration in 2015, has extended patrols to all its land borders. And Poland plans to introduce legislation to temporarily suspend the right of new arrivals to ask for asylum.
The crackdowns have been driven in part by xenophobic, anti-immigrant parties that have played on fears of uncontrolled migration and a dilution of national identity. Their arguments are gaining a more receptive audience with Europeans who worry that the influx of migrants is unmanageable and are frustrated that roughly 80 percent of failed asylum seekers never leave, according to E.U. data.
Their leaders, some of them facing elections, have taken note. In Germany, the Christian Democrats — the party of former chancellor Angela Merkel, who famously welcomed immigrants in 2015 — have been pressing hard for tougher measures to control illegal immigration and is leading in the polls.
“The far right is the mainstream when it comes to migration now,” said Susi Dennison, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Paris.
What do tougher measures look like?
Europe has tried many methods over the years to limit unauthorized migrants from arriving, including controversial programs that paid countries like Libya and Turkey to stop them from taking rickety boats out to sea.
Other measures were seen as either too harsh or potentially illegal. A 2018 E.U. report outlining options concluded that sending asylum seekers to third countries without processing their requests was not permitted under European Union and international law.
So it was a sign of how far the discussion has moved to the right when Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, praised Italy’s plan to send migrants to Albania as “out-of-the-box thinking.” Under Ms. Meloni’s plan, migrants would be screened in Albania and stay in detention centers while they await decisions on their asylum applications.
That plan has been held up by an Italian court that questioned whether asylum seekers from possibly unsafe countries could be held in Albania.
Other ideas floated by European leaders would involve paying countries outside the bloc to process asylum applications and take on the responsibility of deporting those whose claims fail. Human rights groups have questioned the legality of such programs.
Britain unsuccessfully tried a more extreme approach, attempting to send asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing and resettlement. Even those whose claims were accepted would never have been allowed to settle in Britain. The country’s Supreme Court ruled the policy illegal.
Other countries, including Poland and the Netherlands, are, like Germany, intensifying border controls.
Those increased border checks appear to be making a difference, and having something of a domino effect.
On a recent morning in the German town of Görlitz, which sits on the Polish border, police were conducting random checks on people crossing into Germany by car and bus over two of the main bridges spanning the river Neisse, asking to see their identification.
Michael Engler, a federal German police officer, said his colleagues now typically stop about a half dozen unauthorized migrants per day, compared with about 250 in October of last year. The reason, he said: fewer migrants are making it that far, since Poland — on the outer periphery of the bloc — is tightening its own borders.
What is driving the anti-immigrant backlash?
One reason is the sheer numbers of migrants over the last decade and the failure of many governments to integrate them effectively. Some of the blame is also placed on extremist parties exaggerating the problem and the dangers. As they have attracted voters, they have also pushed more centrist parties to take a harder line.
While the numbers of unauthorized migrants attempting to cross into the E.U. dropped 43 percent in the first ten months of this year compared to the same period last year, that follows a year in which the bloc experienced its highest number of such crossings since 2016. At that time, Europe was in the throes of a migration crisis driven in part by more than a million Syrian and Afghan refugees fleeing war.
According to Frontex, the E.U.’s external border agency, there were about 380,000 irregular border crossings into the bloc in 2023.
In addition, more than four million Ukrainians have been offered temporary protection in the European Union since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Also driving outrage is the failure to deport rejected asylum seekers. a task that can be complicated.
Often the migrants’ countries of origin refuse to take them back, especially if the people destroy the paperwork proving where they were born. While the deportation process drags on, migrants can move undetected to other countries in the bloc since there are few restrictions on travel between many European nations.
The anger over failed asylum seekers boiled over in Germany in August, after a Syrian whose application for asylum had been rejected confessed to fatally stabbing three people and wounding eight others at a festival in the city of Solingen. The attack happened just months after a police officer was killed in a knife attack in Mannheim; the Afghan man indicted in that case had also been denied asylum, but then married a German so was in the country legally.
Germany has been successful in integrating many of the refugees who came in 2015 and 2016, but for many Germans, the attacks added to worries that immigration was costing too much when the economy is flagging.
Some local officials and dozens of Germans interviewed in the former East Germany say that the large numbers of immigrants have also strained public services.
Katja Wolf, a state politician from an anti-immigrant party and a former mayor of Eisenach, a German town with a population of 40,000, said people there had embraced migrants early on but soured on them as the numbers overwhelmed schools and health-care facilities.
The town had welcomed 1,000 Syrian refugees in 2015, a number that has grown to 1,600, she said in an interview. “But in two or three years it completely changed the surface of the city,” she said. “Our local people felt that they were not getting help, that as Germans they were being left alone by the state and the refugees got everything they needed.”
She called the higher numbers of migrants “not a healthy increase.”
But some leaders have also publicly noted Europe’s need for workers as the population in Europe ages and the birthrate stays low, leaving gaps in the work force.
Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister of Spain, said last month that immigration is “not just a question of humanitarianism, but it’s also necessary for the prosperity of our economy and the sustainability of the welfare state.” The key, he said, “is in managing it well.”
What happens next?
For now, Europe remains frozen in its attempts to balance the economic necessity for more workers, the concerns of its citizens over migration and the need to abide by longstanding European laws meant to protect refugees.
In Italy, Ms. Meloni has appealed the court’s ruling against her outsourcing plan, a ruling that will be closely watched by other leaders. For now, the detention centers in Albania remain empty.
One thing the European Union has been able to address is the longstanding demand for more countries to share the burden of accepting or caring for migrants, but even that plan does not come into effect until 2026. The program aims to more evenly distribute migrants and the cost of receiving them, reducing pressure on countries like Greece, Italy and Spain, where many migrants first land.
In the meantime, ideas like Ms. Meloni’s are gaining favor, with other leaders also considering paying countries to process asylum applications and possibly deport those whose claims are denied.
Raphael Bossong, a researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said it would be an enormous challenge to find countries that are willing to take failed asylum seekers, when there is no clear way to legally deport them. “There is a lot of hot air in terms of what could be done next,” he said.
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