Guest
Essay
There’s a
Reason Europe Is So Obsessed With Immigration
Sept. 15,
2026
Credit...Alberto
Miranda
By Anton Jäger
Mr. Jäger
is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “Hyperpolitics.” He wrote
from Brussels.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/15/opinion/europe-immigration-ceuta-far-right.html
The
historian Eric Hobsbawm was no friend of nationalism.
Growing
up Jewish in the ruins of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, he held an
instinctual suspicion of all claims to national belonging. Yet as a phalanx of
new nationalist parties entered European parliaments in the early 1990s,
claiming that migration constituted a mortal threat to their communities, he
offered a surprising interpretation. The appeal of anti-migrant politics, he
speculated, lay less in a sense of national pride than in its ability to cover
a hole at the heart of Europeans’ self-understanding. “There was no other way
left to define group identity,” he wrote, “except by defining the outsiders who
were not in it.”
The words
carry a strange resonance for Europe today. More than six weeks after tens of
thousands of migrants crossed into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta,
hoping for passage to mainland Europe, immigration continues to dominate the
continent’s conversation. Across European capitals, a common reaction has been
to chastise Spain — whose relatively generous immigration policy is held
responsible for the surge — and promise less permeable borders. With thousands
still camping out in Ceuta and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain struggling
to contain the fallout, the subject seems unlikely to subside soon.
The furor
clearly concerns more than migrants. Though polls indicate that European
electorates care deeply about migration and want to see it addressed, such
worries outstrip objective reality. Instead, the topic has become a prism
through which all the continent’s ills are viewed, a convenient kaleidoscope of
discontent. The problems of such a worldview are legion. Yet there is a deeper
reason, beyond the continued arrival of migrants, for the continentwide
obsession with outsiders: Europe doesn’t know what it is.
In
European debates, migration is not simply presented as a problem to be managed.
Rather, it is now held responsible for a gamut of problems, from poor social
services to wage stagnation to crime. For the Dutch far-right politician Geert
Wilders, the country’s housing crisis and debt levels are best explained by the influx of foreigners.
Such thinking is no longer confined to the fringes. In Germany, for example,
the coalition government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz has attributed the dilapidated condition of many of the
country’s cities to newcomers.
Attempts
to fact-check such claims — asserting that the effects of immigration are
ambiguous, or warning that an aging continent needs new arrivals to sustain
itself — miss the point. Research indicates that the far right’s surest footholds are in
regions with comparatively few migrants, as in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt,
where the Alternative for Germany party just scored a landslide victory.
Europeans’ anxieties about migration increasingly appear to float freely, a
heuristic through which they can make sense of the continent’s overlapping
crises. This mode of thinking will continue to occupy the European mind for the
foreseeable future.
The first
reason is external. The consequences of global inequality were already
glaringly obvious in Mr. Hobsbawm’s time. In the 1990s, he noted how Europe was
“surrounded by poor countries with vast armies of the young, clamoring for the
modest jobs in the rich world which make men and women rich by the standards of
El Salvador or Morocco.” His conclusion was prescient: “These frictions will be
a major factor in the politics, national or global, of the next decades.”
Indeed,
these tensions have if anything grown more pronounced. Although global
inequality technically fell in the past 30 years, that decline can largely be
attributed to one country: China. Generally, the gap in living standards between the
West and the rest remains dizzyingly large, a stubborn fact of global politics
exacerbated by regional conflicts. It has also gained a jarring new visibility
on the smartphone screens now widely available across the developing world.
The
second reason is internal. Built as a common market before it came to resemble
anything like a state, the European Union has always had difficulty
articulating what it represented. In the late 1990s, the problem became
manifest in the design of the bank notes that were to make up the union’s new
currency. In the end, the euro was emblazoned with abstract shapes such as
arches and aqueducts, rather than recognizable characters from Europe’s
patrimony. To some scholars, this signaled that the union was above all a
confederation of consumers.
In recent
years, the union has embarked on a quest to define its “shared European home,”
as Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, puts it. Along
with chairs in E.U. studies, the bloc’s executive arm now finances initiatives
aimed at raising Europeans’ sense of self. One was a well-publicized campaign
by the commission called “Protect What Matters.” There, citizens were urged to
appreciate the union’s founding principles, such as “free speech,” “free
science” and “free press.” Even the bank notes are set to receive a makeover.
These
efforts are undoubtedly attractive to some in the continent’s besieged
borderlands, such as Ukraine and Georgia, where younger and more educated
citizens still discern great promise in European affiliation. Yet it is unclear
how much such campaigns can achieve. A succession of crises — chiefly economic,
but also cultural and social — has made the argument for unity more
challenging. At the same time, the transformation of many European countries
into tourist-driven service economies has only worsened the disorientation.
This
uncertainty about the continent’s character and future is strikingly — and
perhaps ironically — perceptible on the far right. One of Mr. Wilders’s
favorite spots in the Netherlands is the fairy-tale forest Efteling, located in the
south of the country. The theme park, featuring gnomes, dragons and other
figures from children’s tales, is not an example of local folklore but an
imaginary world wholly outside of history. The far right’s fondness for “The Lord of the Rings” is suggestive of the same
fantastical relationship with reality.
Perhaps
political coherence should not be expected from a diverse set of 450 million
people with no unitary state or single language. Yet nationalism at the
member-state level is hardly less brittle, itself dependent on the boogeyman of
migration. Unable to systemically unseat the power of Brussels, Europe’s far
right clings to anti-migrant antics for an oppositional stance where there no
longer is one. After all, the center and the far right have forged a consensus
around stringent border enforcement and attempted deportations.
The
result is something of a riddle. Migration is assailed from practically all
sides as a threat to Europe’s identity. Yet in the 21st century, it is unclear
what exactly that identity is. No longer the seat of globe-spanning empires,
much less a world hegemon, the continent comes across as both prestigious and
provincial: a cultural powerhouse suffering geopolitical marginalization. Civic
Europeanism, for all the commission’s best efforts, will prove a feeble
antidote to such ailments. Instead, it falls to migration to fill the void at
the center of Europe’s self-image.
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