Europe’s populists push for migrant clampdown as Trump cranks up rhetoric

From Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán to Denmark’s socialist Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, Europe’s leaders have one thing in common — an urge to clamp down on migration.

Orbán set the tone earlier this week by threatening to send migrants by bus to historic Grand Place in Brussels, a stone’s throw from the European Union’s institutions (borrowing from the playbook of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who starting in 2022 ordered that thousands of undocumented migrants be transported out of his state).

As far-right parties continue to notch electoral gains, other European leaders are also piling pressure on Brussels to get tougher on migration. France’s newly installed prime minister, Michel Barnier, vowed last week to “limit migration,” while German Chancellor Olaf Scholz recently shut his country’s external borders following a knife attack allegedly involving an asylum seeker.

In doing so they join Austria, the Netherlands and a cohort of Nordic countries that all back a tougher stance on migration. One common strand? All face pressure from far-right parties that are laser-focused on migration — or have recently lost elections to them.

“This is a little wave that’s quickly turning into a tidal wave,” said one EU diplomat, referring to recent comments from EU leaders. “This is the sort of thing that keeps leaders up at night because it’s perceived as an issue that concerns voters — hence the push we’re seeing today.”

The crackdown marks a drastic turnaround from the open-borders policy embraced by Germany’s ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose decision to allow more than a million irregular migrants into the bloc in 2015 later sparked an EU-wide backlash.

It also echoes harsh anti-migrant rhetoric from U.S. presidential contender Donald Trump, who has called for 10-20 million people to be deported from the United States. 

The difference is that in Europe, the pressure to crack down is coming both from far-right forces such as Austria’s Freedom Party, which won a national election at the weekend, and social democratic leaders like Frederiksen and Scholz, who are now joining in despite their parties’ historically more liberal stance.

For Catherine de Vries, a political scientist at Bocconi University, the anti-migrant push owes to fears among more traditional politicians of being overtaken by far-right parties. Chasing the far-right’s votes on migration, however, may not be the winning strategy they hope for.

“If they [European mainstream parties] start to accommodate those positions, over time they are normalized and voters often vote for the real thing rather than the copy,” she said.

“Mainstream parties have not sufficiently developed an alternative narrative of how they will address these concerns about crumbling services.”

Deportations and reception centers

The question of how Europe can speed up deportations, limit new arrivals and persuade non-EU countries to keep migrants from heading toward the bloc will dominate a series of high-level meetings in the coming weeks.

Several diplomats said migration would top the agenda at a meeting of EU interior ministers in mid-October and feature prominently at a gathering of leaders in Brussels on Oct. 17. An early version of the latter meeting’s conclusions contains a strongly worded paragraph calling for “strengthening control of the EU’s external borders.”

“Is the discussion inside Europe changing? Yes, it is, maybe a bit too late,” Frederiksen told Bloomberg last week. “For me, after Ukraine, this [migration] is target number one. It has to really be on top of our mind and priorities.”

A few months ago the EU passed its “Migration and Asylum Pact” — a hard-fought reform of the bloc’s migration rules that was more than a decade in the making, and that is due to come online in the next two years. The bloc grants countries substantial flexibility in how to deal with irregular migration, including by closing their borders to other EU countries.

But that’s still not good enough for many. “The migration pact is en route but there is a lot of work,” said a second EU diplomat, also granted anonymity to speak freely. “There is more and more the feeling that the EU needs to step up to avoid a worse alternative, which is what the populists want.”

Advocates for a tougher migration policy argue that countries need fresh guidelines from Brussels on how they can legally deport migrants back to their home countries, as well as new tools to pressure countries into taking their citizens back — including by linking returns to access to EU visas or to preferential trade access to the bloc’s vast market.

“Returns are a big issue,” the first EU diplomat said. “There is a large number of people who have gone through the system, have been deemed inadmissible as asylum seekers, and who should return but do not and as a result keep occupying places for other people.”

There is also pressure for the EU to strike fresh deals with countries on its periphery to limit migration, along the lines of a controversial €7.4 billion deal with Egypt or a €1 billion deal with Tunisia. Italy recently reopened diplomatic ties with Syria after a 12-year freeze as part of a bid to encourage Damascus to take back some of its citizens who fled during a bloody civil war. Rome is pushing other EU states to follow suit, though appetite seems limited for now.

The European Parliament is also set to mirror the tougher stance of EU countries, especially with right-wing groups having gained more leverage after June’s European election.

“We need an EU deportation mechanism to leverage trade and aid against countries that refuse to take back their citizens in a timely manner,” said Sweden’s Charlie Weimers of the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR).

Other areas where the Migration and Asylum Pact needs to be reinforced, Weimers said, include increasing the number of asylum-seeker reception centers in non-EU countries, funding for external border “barriers,” and a returns directive that “should enable rather than hinder member states in detaining illegals.”

In that sense, the ECR is close to the European People’s Party (EPP), the Parliament’s biggest faction. Ahead of the recent European election the EPP vowed to send asylum seekers to centers in third countries, double down on returns, and triple staff at the EU’s Frontex border agency, among other measures. 

Several countries — as well as the Parliament — are now pushing the Commission to draft a fresh set of migration guidelines, allowing EU countries to use leverage to force countries to take their migrants back, for instance by withholding visas, linking returns to favorable access to the EU’s internal market, or suspending visa-free travel for diplomats.

The Commission proposed such a plan in 2018, but it never became law due to opposition from the European Parliament. The Parliament, however, is now a different place, with conservative and far-right forces controlling a larger number of seats.