Remigration vs. Mass Immigration: A Fault Line At the Heart of the European Union

The European Union (EU) has been in perpetual crisis for decades. The Great Financial Crisis (GFC), the Eurozone crisis, the Greek debt crisis, the slow growth in Southern Europe, the post-COVID debt crisis, the 2015 migrant crisis (which is still ongoing), the crisis and split over Ukraine, and on and on it goes. Crises in the EU never seem to end. At the heart of all of these crises is the deeply set neoliberal vision and construction of the union. Today European politics has shifted from grappling with a crisis of mass immigration and border control into a new and deeply polarizing debate over immigration policy that pits advocates of "remigration"—the return of non-European immigrants and their descendants—against proponents of continuing the liberal love for mass immigration.

This clash is ultimately rooted in divergent visions of numerous issues that plague Western civilization: our identity, the sovereignty of our nations, and whether or not immigrants are really an economic necessity. Whether countries choose nationalism and a coherent identity or whether they chose the path of continued self-abolition has the potential to fracture the EU’s already fragile unity.

The Rise of Remigration:

Remigration has several definitions, generally un-generously provided by left wing (which are also mainstream) outlets and platforms but ultimately remigration (sometimes called repatriation in Europe such as in Sweden) refers to the deportation or incentivized return of non-European/non-Western immigrants and their non-integrated descendants to their ancestral homelands.

After decades of Western peoples voting for less immigration and tighter border controls, and not receiving either, remigration based policies have begun to gain traction among nationalist and national conservative parties across Europe. The Swedish government, supported by the national conservative Sweden Democrats, is already implementing a paid repatriation policy. Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which in 2019 called for “remigration instead of mass immigration” is now the second largest party in the German Bundestag and is polling in first place post-election.

Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ) recently won the 2024 election on a platform calling for national “homogeneity”—party leader Herbert Kickl said “We need remigration” when he presented the party platform in August of 2024 in the lead up to the election victory.

Europeans voted for decades for less immigration and stronger borders and because they never received these things from their politicians must now seek to reverse the decades of cultural, social, and economic damage done to our countries. For some context, in 2023 the EU recorded 1.14 million asylum applications, primarily from Africa and the Middle East, alongside 29 million legal and illegal immigrants arriving over the past decade. High-profile incidents, such as terrorist attacks by Islamist extremists and rising crime rates in migrant-heavy areas have led to a string of murders, sexual assaults, and ‘no-go zones’ plaguing native Europeans.

Liberalism and Continued Mass Immigration:

On the other side, proponents of liberal-inspired mass immigration argue a plethora of positions. These range from migration being essential for economic growth, that immigrants are necessary to do certain jobs that Europeans “just won’t do”, to opponents of mass immigration being simple bigots or racists who can’t stand the sight of a Black or Brown person. The more intellectual on the pro-mass immigration side often argue that Europe’s aging population and low fertility rates (themselves a result of liberal policy-making) create a demographic crisis that immigrants can address. A 2024 IMF study estimated that the 2020-2023 migration surge, including 4 million Ukrainian refugees, boosted the euro area’s potential output by 0.5% by 2030, filling two-thirds of new jobs created since 2019. Countries like Germany, which pledged to resettle 13,000 UN-screened refugees in 2024-2025, supposedly rely on migrants to sustain pensions and economic growth. The lie to this position was recently proven (again) by the very-mainstream Center of Economic and Policy Research which shows that mass immigration leads to greater welfare spending and economic burden on the German people.

Humanitarian arguments also underpin liberal immigration policies. The EU’s 2015-2016 migration crisis, when 1.3 million so-called asylum seekers arrived, highlighted the bloc’s commitment to international asylum laws. Leaders like Germany’s Angela Merkel, who accepted over 1 million refugees in 2015, framed open borders as a moral duty, though she was noticeably less concerned about her moral duty to protect the German nation from predation. A 2018 report by Germany’s own interior ministry titled “Criminality in the context of immigration” examined crime committed by asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, and other tolerated irregular foreigners in Germany and found that these groups are 2% of the population but are responsible for 8.5% of all crime in Germany. They were suspects in 14.3% of murders, 12.2% of sexual assaults, 11.4% in thefts, and 9.7% of suspects for assaults that resulted in bodily injury.

Ultimately liberalism’s love of mass immigration policies is rooted in its post-nationalist ideology. This ideology is quite literally written into the EU’s founding documents and was inspired by the 1941 Ventotene Manifesto, which rejected nationalism in favor of universalism and open borders. It’s worth noting that the manifesto was written by avowed Italian communist Altiero Spinelli who would later go on to be a member of the European Parliament and a European Commissioner. Mr. Spinelli, like the EU today, was deeply contemptuous of democracy and viewed it as “dead weight” in a hindrance to his “revolutionary crisis” that is meant to bring about the end of the nation-state.

The European Union considers Spinelli as one of its ‘founding fathers’.

The EU’s Fracturing Unity:

The clash between remigration and liberal mass immigration policies is already contributing to fractures in the EU’s facade and is likely to drive a very large wedge between EU member states, political elites, and their publics in the coming years. Nationalist and national-conservative parties continue to gain ground with each passing election. In the 2024 European Parliament elections, right-wing parties secured over 25% of seats, forcing mainstream center-right groups like the European People’s Party to adopt tougher stances. In Germany, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) broke a post-WWII taboo by voting with the AfD in 2025 to restrict family reunification, signaling a mainstream shift toward restrictionism.

Eastern European states, like Hungary and Poland, openly defy the EU’s migration policies. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán called the 2024 Migration Pact “another nail in the coffin of the EU,” rejecting relocation quotas. Poland’s Donald Tusk, despite seeking better EU relations, vowed to block migrant relocations altogether. This resistance undermines the Pact’s “mandatory solidarity,” risking its collapse. Meanwhile, southern states like Italy, overwhelmed by arrivals (e.g., 7,000 migrants in two days on Lampedusa in 2023), demand greater burden-sharing, exacerbating north-south tensions.

Public opinion further complicates the divide. A 2024 Eurobarometer survey ranked immigration among the top two issues for EU citizens, with 66% of French respondents supporting remigration of illegal immigrants and foreign criminals. The EU and left have been reduced to relying on the ever-less-important mainstream media to make protests against so-called far-right remigration plans, such as those in Germany following a 2023 AfD meeting exposed by Correctiv,(which called the supposed plans a Secret plan against Germany) seem significant and important when they in truth are not.

The AfD’s poll numbers have only continued to increase. This choice by the EU and its remaining liberal partners in national capitals fuels polarization and fuels Euroskepticism. The EU is very much “digging its own grave” in this respect.

Remigration, meanwhile, poses its own challenges and proponents of remigration need to craft careful policy. People need to be deported, but with as much Human dignity as possible. Marriage, birth, family, and work related immigration fraud needs to be curtailed significantly, without deporting or harassing the immigrant spouses or children of Europeans. And there is the ever-thorny issue of deciding at what level of integration (or lack thereof) someone of immigrant descent is welcome to remain in Europe or whether they must go - White Papers believes the best solution to this problem is voluntary paid remigration.

Ultimately the issue of remigration vs mass immigration will lead to institutional paralysis as European governments battle at the EU level over issues like the Migration Pact, the role of FRONTEX, and the powers of national authorities vs those of EU/ECHR courts. Euroskepticism is likely to continue to surge and liberal political parties (whether left wing or conservative) are going to make moves to attempt and appease European publics. The German government is reportedly considering radically tightening border controls and instituting a state of emergency, a move that would strike yet another blow to the already weakened Schengen Area.

While the EU’s future hinges on navigating the remigration vs. mass immigration it is the future of European nations that hinge on whether or not Western elites finally abandon this project of national suicide via mass immigration. If democracy—an invention of Western civilization—is to have any meaning then European peoples must ‘get their way’ and the trends of demographic change and mass immigration must not only stop but must in part be reversed.

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