Europe’s ruling political and economic elites have long maintained that mass migration, legal or not, is at worst, inevitable, and at best, positive. But the fact remains that mass migration is unpopular with Germans and other citizens throughout the European Union.
At the Munich Security Conference last week, Vice President JD Vance told European leaders that censoring and ignoring their own voters’ strong feelings about mass migration was a mistake. This struck a nerve in Germany, which is so afraid of resurgent nationalism that it has outlawed some political parties and banned certain speech that defies the pro-migration narrative.
German voters’ concerns include fears for their physical safety as more young men from violent countries continue to enter, invited or not. As Ken Weinstein of the Hudson Institute writes, “Massive migration from Islamic countries since 2015 has created a dangerous domestic security challenge” for Germany.
To back up this point, one day before the conference, a young Afghan man ran a car into a crowd in Munich, wounding around 30, two of whom have now died from their injuries. Three days later, a young Syrian man stabbed six strangers in neighboring Austria, killing a 14-year old boy.
Each European country has reacted in its own way to uninvited migration, much of which happens via often-fraudulent asylum claims.
Hungary, which, as far as I can tell, has experienced zero terrorist-inspired bombings, stabbings, shootings, or car-ramming attacks in the recent past, refuses to accept the forced “sharing” of the illegal migration burden imposed by the European Union. As a result, the EU has punished it with massive fines.
Denmark, once a typical left-leaning welcomer of mass asylum-seekers, has made it much tougher for them to come illegally and stay. Their government has had a “zero refugee” policy since 2019 and has granted under 1,000 asylum requests in total in 2024.
Italy elected Giorgia Meloni because of her tough stance on illegal migration. The French are inching closer to handing the presidency to immigration hawk Marine Le Pen.
The British were so unhappy with asylum-seekers—many arriving by boat from France—that they left the EU. Though that did them little good, as both the Conservative Party-run government and its Labour Party successor have been unwilling to stop the flow of migration under the guise of asylum claims.
But Germany, where Vance spoke, receives between a third to a half of all asylum requests in the EU. Changes to its asylum policy will affect the entire EU. Germany received a quarter million asylum applications in 2024 (down 30% from 2023) but deported only 16,000 foreigners. It now has over 400,000 Afghans alone living in the country. Some are in the process of claiming asylum, some have received it, and others have been rejected but not yet deported.
Germany has parliamentary elections this month, and the Alternative for Germany party is rising in the polls because of its clear policy to end mass migration and ramp up deportations. Even if the Alternative for Germany has driven other parties to accept tougher asylum rules and more deportations of those who aren’t approved for entry, the German political establishment wants the party kept out of power and has refused to work with them.
However, voters are reminded regularly of what’s at stake. The deadly assault in Munich is just the latest in a spate of violent attacks by asylum applicants, or failed asylum applicants.
On Jan. 22, an Afghan man killed two people in a German park with a knife. One victim was only 2 years old. The perpetrator arrived in Germany in 2022 and was supposed to have left after he dropped his asylum application.
On Sept. 5 last year, police in Munich shot an 18-year-old terrorism suspect near the Israeli consulate. The month before, a Syrian man who had been denied asylum stabbed and killed three people in Solingen. In May 2024, an Afghan man stabbed and killed a police officer in Mannheim, and another man stabbed a politician in a separate incident.
Overall in Germany, immigrants make up about 15% of the population but commit more than 40% of the crimes. Seventy-five percent of their victims are German citizens. When it comes to violent sex crimes, migrants from a few Muslim-majority countries make up a disproportionate percentage of the perpetrators. There were 300 gang rapes reported in the country in 2018, but 677 in 2021, according to German police. Foreign nationals were suspects in half of those cases.
When a local party leader of the Alternative for Germany Party, Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, published official statistics showing that Afghan male immigrants are disproportionately involved in sexual offenses, she was convicted of “incitement to hatred” and fined.
But officious stifling of debate—what Vance called “running in fear from your own voters”—won’t change the fact that migration is one of the central issues in this election to Germans, and they don’t want more of it. Trump won decisively in America by listening to voters, repudiating the globalist migration agenda, and restoring border and interior enforcement.
Germans might be scoffing at the vice president’s warning and condemning him for “interfering” in their politics, but their actions speak louder. With days to go before the election, the mainstream parties are talking about border controls, tougher asylum standards, and ramped-up deportations—sounding more like the Alternative for Germany Party every day.
The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues such as human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.
Canada’s Migrant Crisis Spills Over to US, Raising Concerns
Trump Proves ‘Yes We Can’ Reduce Illegal Migration