Talk of European migration policy often evokes the image of boats. Dinghies in the Mediterranean, NGO rescue ships stuck outside Italian ports, flimsy inflatables in the English Channel. European leaders argue over how many migrants each country must accept, which coastal state is responsible for search and rescue, and whether NGOs should be fined or funded. These debates matter, but they miss the central problems facing Europe. Migrant boats keep coming toward Europe, but the larger European ship has also struck an iceberg. That iceberg is a combination of an unresolved identity crisis and a demographic collapse. Fights about relocation quotas and asylum procedures are, at best, about the chairs on the deck, but Europe keeps staggering on with a giant hole in the hull.
Defining the Problem
American Exceptionalism
In “No True Scotsman,” I argued that American identity is fundamentally value based. When a US military officer is commissioned, the oath is “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The object of loyalty is not a king or even “the American people,” but a set of principles written in 1787 by men who have taken on an almost sacred status in our national imagination. Our Sovereign is a text that anyone can in principle internalize. This creed is joined to a powerful national myth. The frontier story and the immigrant story are two versions of the same narrative: oppressed people bet on themselves, head for new territory, and build something better. From westerns to The Godfather, American cinema celebrates the immigrant who, after some struggle, becomes fully American. The story works because there is a reasonably clear instruction manual: learn English, work hard, obey the law, believe in the Constitution. Millions have done exactly that.
European oaths of office look different. British officials swear allegiance to “His Majesty King Charles, his heirs and successors, according to law,” and defenders of the British model often gesture toward the “English Constitution.” But the English Constitution is not really a constitution. It is an unwritten web of habits, judicial precedents, and parliamentary conventions that provide no clear civic story for newcomers to join and no founding moment that anchors national identity. Worse, Britain’s own political development in the last several decades has exposed how fragile these unwritten liberties actually are. Its winner-take-all parliamentary system grants governments elected with narrow pluralities sweeping authority, allowing rights that supposedly form the bedrock of the “English Constitution” to be eroded at an accelerating pace. It has become increasingly evident that the true guarantor of British liberty is not Westminster, but the American security umbrella and the liberal hegemonic order it enforces.
Germany, Italy and France, ground their oaths in republican constitutions, but without the quasi religious reverence Americans reserve for theirs. And phrases such as “the rights and liberty of the German people” immediately raise the question of who counts as German, and on what terms. The point is not that Europe lacks nations. It is that many European projects of nationhood do not offer newcomers anything like a widely believed instruction manual for becoming part of “us.” In an age of mass migration, that ambiguity becomes fatal.
Misplaced Guilt
In “Are We the Baddies? Mrs. Jellyby’s Revenge,” I used Charles Dickens’s character Mrs. Jellyby to describe a particular kind of modern Western empathy. Dickens coined the term “telescopic philanthropy” for her obsession with distant Africans while her own children wander around filthy and neglected. He understood moral vanity disguised as compassion long before anyone complained about “virtue signalling.” Contemporary European migration politics often look like a Jellyby household. A German classmate described friends who loudly supported high levels of immigration but refused to send their children to schools with large migrant populations. Their social media personas and their revealed preferences did not match. They loved “Syrians” in the abstract, not as classmates for their kids.
Underneath this lies a story of Western guilt. It is true that European colonialism and American interventions had destructive elements. It does not follow that the poverty of Afghanistan, Syria, or the Sahel is primarily the fault of London, Paris, or Washington. For most of human history, life has been, in Hobbes’s phrase, “nasty, brutish and short.” War, famine, and tyranny are the default condition of humanity, not a special Western export. It may feel morally attractive to say “we owe them,” but translating a general human duty to do good into a specific, permanent obligation to particular regions is sloppy and dangerous. At its worst it becomes a kind of moral accounting in which Europe is forever a debtor and parts of the global South forever creditors.
What Is “the West” by Comparison?
Europe’s confusion becomes clearer when we compare it with other regions. Russia presents itself as a civilization state grounded in Orthodoxy, Slavic ethnicity, and great power status. Its national story emphasizes historic destiny, the Third Rome, and victory in the “Great Patriotic War.” Membership is not something one acquires by subscribing to a creed. Russia maintains a thick, particularist identity and does not apologize for it. China likewise treats its national identity as ethnonational. While the People’s Republic is formally constitutional, “Chineseness” is in practice tied to Han ethnicity, civilizational continuity, and a narrative that is explicitly non universalist. Immigration is tightly restricted and largely non assimilative. No one seriously claims that people who “share our values” can simply become Chinese.
Across much of the Arab world, identity is anchored in a shared language and in Islam, with the ummah binding believers into a larger community. These states are not designed to absorb large numbers of culturally distant immigrants, and prioritizing co-religionists is seen as normal, not evidence of moral failure. Sub Saharan Africa is in some ways Europe’s demographic mirror. It is the world’s youngest region, with many states having median ages under 20, while Europe has the oldest. African governments often manage fragile civic identities layered onto older ethnic and tribal loyalties. In European discourse, these societies are frequently treated as moral creditors, the “peoples we have wronged,” whose youth must be granted access to Europe as repayment. Taken together, these comparisons highlight Europe’s uniqueness. It is the only actor that simultaneously preaches universalism and feels guilty about defending its own particular way of life.
Europe’s Identity Vacuum
Europe’s identity problem has institutional consequences. Since the 1990s, European elites have tried to build a supranational identity on vibes: openness, human rights, and being “rules based.” In practice, European identity is often reduced to lifestyle clichés about wine, siestas, trains, and public health care.
At the same time, the European Union has centralized major parts of migration and asylum policy in institutions that are only weakly accountable to voters. The European Commission, the European Court of Justice, and a dense network of agencies and NGOs shape policy more than national parliaments do. The pattern around referendums is telling. When French and Dutch voters rejected the proposed European Constitution in 2005, its substance returned in the Lisbon Treaty, this time ratified by parliaments. When Irish voters rejected Nice and later Lisbon, they were asked again until they supplied the “correct” answer. Citizens learn that “democracy” is valid only when it ratifies elite preferences.
On a question that touches the basic composition of political communities, voters are treated as obstacles rather than principals. Not surprisingly, trust erodes. The aggregate views of the EU remain broadly favorable, but that headline number conceals intense polarization between cosmopolitan cores and more skeptical peripheries. It is not irrational for citizens who experience policy as something done to them by a distant bureaucracy to ask whether democracy still means anything.
Immigration did not cause Europe’s identity crisis. It forced it into the open. When you do not know who you are, you cannot say who can become one of you. In that vacuum, policy drifts toward a combination of Jellyby style empathy and technocratic tinkering, which satisfies no one.
US 2025 National Security Strategy and the Transatlantic Journey
Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) articulates this critique in unusually blunt terms. The Europe chapter warns that the continent faces “the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure,” driven by EU institutions that undermine sovereignty, migration policies that transform the continent, collapsing birthrates, and the loss of national self confidence. It predicts that parts of Europe will be “unrecognizable in 20 years or less” absent a course correction. The NSS calls for “restoring Europe’s civilizational self confidence and Western identity” and explicitly links American interests to Europe’s ability to remain European. The broader principle that “the era of mass migration is over” is applied not just to the United States, but to the wider West.
In light of these harsh words however, I would reinforce the following. The United States and Europe are not just allies. They are parts of the same civilization. Our languages, universities, legal systems, and cultural references are intertwined. American democracy is unthinkable without British constitutional history and French political thought, just as contemporary European security is unthinkable without the American nuclear umbrella. Beneath Trump’s strong words lies an obvious truth, fortunately or not, a true “divorce” would be impossible. If one partner sinks on this transatlantic journey, we will be dragged under together.
Defining the Opportunity
Europe’s Demographic Iceberg
At the beginning of 2024, the EU population stood at about 449 million, with more than one fifth already aged 65 or older. That share has risen from around 16 percent in 2004 to roughly 22 percent today and continues to climb, especially in countries like Italy, Portugal, and Bulgaria. Europe’s median age is now around 44.7 years, the highest of any world region. Eurostat projects that even with some migration the EU’s population will fall by around 6 percent by 2100. A Guardian analysis suggests that without continued immigration the decline could be far steeper, from roughly 447 million to around 295 million, with enormous strain on pensions, healthcare, and the labor force.
The Immigration Solution
Immigration already functions as a demographic stopgap. Eurostat reports that the EU’s population reached a record 450.4 million in 2024 entirely because net migration of 2.3 million people offset a natural decrease of 1.3 million, as deaths outnumbered births. This is the fourth consecutive year in which migration has been the only source of population growth. Migrants are heavily represented in eldercare, hospitals, agriculture, and low wage service sectors, the jobs native Europeans are increasingly unwilling or unable to do. Demographers agree that without some immigration the fiscal strain of aging societies would become even more severe.
At the same time, immigration is not a silver bullet. To keep old age dependency ratios stable purely through migration would require inflows that would rapidly transform the cultural and religious makeup of European societies. That may be acceptable in theory for those who think identity is infinitely malleable. It is clearly not acceptable to most voters. Demography means Europe no longer has the luxury of muddling through. The question is not whether there will be migration, but which migrants come, under what rules, and into what story. If Europe continues to quibble about bean counting issues like which member state takes which quota and how long people stay in reception centers, the hull of the ship will continue to buckle.
What Ought to Be Done?
Messaging as Deterrence
Political messaging is an underused policy tool which the Trump administration embraced wholeheartedly. Alongside concrete measures such as “Remain in Mexico” and the aggressive use of Title 42 expulsions, it deployed deliberately harsh rhetoric, making clear in speeches and through the president’s and DHS’s Twitter accounts that those who came illegally would not be allowed to stay and that they were not welcome. Even Kamala Harris felt compelled once to say “do not come” to would be migrants. No one believed her, of course, because by then the Democratic Party had lost credibility on enforcement. Data suggest that when Title 8 enforcement with real legal consequences returned, some sectors of the border saw sustained declines, which underscores that credible enforcement requires a change in rhetoric.
The conceptual lesson is straightforward. Messaging from the top is part of the policy toolkit. Elites often treat “being mean” in rhetoric as inherently illegitimate. But if firm words deter dangerous journeys, reduce deaths at sea, and signal that laws matter, then some calibrated meanness may be more humane than the status quo. My friend’s Trump-supporting, first-generation immigrant Nigerian doctor mother captured this with a line I keep returning to. When challenged about Trump’s character, she shrugged and said, “He is not my pastor.” In her view, a political leader’s job is to protect the community, not to be a saint. The famous line from A Few Good Men says the same thing: “You want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.” Someone has to say “no.” We confuse the roles of pastors and political leaders at our peril.
When the Center Refuses to Enforce
A Greek center right politician who visited our class illustrated the political danger of permanent niceness. He noted that some far right actors in his country literally advocate bombing migrant boats. His point was not that this will happen tomorrow, but that such ideas become thinkable when mainstream politicians refuse to enforce any boundary at all. I am not arguing that Europe should entertain homicidal fantasies. I am arguing that humane, clearly communicated deterrence by centrist leaders can rescue politics from the boat bombers.
“Mean” European Politicians
We already see European leaders experimenting with firmer lines. Giorgia Meloni’s government in Italy has restricted NGO ship operations and sought to externalize asylum processing through deals with countries such as Albania, explicitly presenting irregular migration as incompatible with Italian social stability. Matteo Salvini, during his stint as interior minister, ran a very public “closed ports” policy, using theatrical standoffs with NGO vessels to signal resolve. In France, Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour have built movements on civilizational rhetoric, promising to reassert national preference in welfare and employment. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has built fences, tightened asylum rules, and openly defended “illiberal democracy” as necessary to preserve Hungarian cultural homogeneity.
These figures demonstrate real demand for firmer boundaries. If the only politicians willing to say what many voters privately believe are those flirting with extremism, suppressing them will not make the sentiment disappear. It may be that something like Meloni or Orbán is the least bad alternative to a much darker future.
Selective Immigration
One lesson from the American experience is that civic identities can be powerful if they are tied to concrete institutions and stories. Citizenship oaths that reference constitutions, civic education that explains the importance of free speech, secularism, and gender equality, and public ceremonies that treat naturalization as a serious rite of passage all help. Civic religion cannot be manufactured on command, but politicians can at least stop undermining their own histories.
At the same time, Europe should be honest about selectivity. In The Culture Transplant, Garrett Jones argues that migrants carry persistent cultural traits, including norms around trust and cooperation, that shape the long run quality of institutions in receiving countries. Countries that admit large numbers of people from societies with low social trust and weak institutions risk importing those problems. Applied to Europe, this suggests a more modest, targeted model. Instead of treating all inflows as morally equivalent, European states should prioritize migrants whose skills and cultural backgrounds make successful integration likely: people with relevant languages, skills, and evidence of respect for liberal norms. That is not racism. It is an attempt to preserve fragile liberal institutions that will not easily be rebuilt once lost.
Conclusion
The Titanic image helps sort big problems from small ones. Policy tweaks to relocation quotas, asylum processing, and NGO rules are deck chairs. The iceberg is identity and demography. Immigration, especially from culturally distant societies, is not the iceberg itself, but it makes the collision imminent by forcing questions of “who we are” and “who can join us” that Europe has tried to avoid. The United States has done better at assimilation because it offers a clear, value based identity anchored in a revered constitution. Europe often does not know what it is asking people to become. A culture of misdirected empathy and misplaced historical guilt leaves elites morally disarmed in the face of large scale migration. Aging populations mean immigration cannot simply be turned off. The real task is to shape who comes, under what conditions, and into what story.
Political leaders are not pastors. Their job is not to make everyone feel included at all times, but to ensure human flourishing for the people and community that comprises their demos. Sometimes that requires being “mean” at the border in order to be kind to the polity. Empathy ordered properly begins at home and radiates outward. Only once the ship is righted can we properly enjoy our transatlantic journey.