The issue of migration has soared to one of the top concerns of citizens in European Union countries in recent months, as populist parties surge throughout the bloc to the chagrin of the legacy open borders establishment.
The annual Eurobarometer survey published by the European Commission on Monday found that immigration now ranks within the top three most concerning issues facing citizens of EU nations. While the inflation and cost of living crisis, and the war in Ukraine still remain the top two most important matters facing the public, immigration has risen from ranking sixth to the third most pressing issue over just the past six months, alone.
According to the survey, 27 per cent cited inflation as their chief concern, 25 per cent said the international situation (the war in Ukraine), and 24 per cent pointed to immigration, meaning that immigration only trails the top concern by three percentage points.
The increase in concern over migration comes as an estimated 8 million Ukrainians have sought refuge in Europe since the Russian invasion last year, putting increased pressure on asylum systems across the bloc, which were already stretched thing from waves of economic migrants and refugees from impoverished or war-torn regions in Africa and the Middle East that have continued since the European Migrant Crisis began in 2015.
In addition to the millions of Ukrainians and other genuine refugees, Europe has also seen over 92,000 illegal migrants cross the Mediterranean Sea on people smuggler-operated boats since the start of the year. This year also saw one of the deadliest migrant drowning incidents in recorded history, with an estimated 750 people plunging to their deaths off the coast of Greece last month after allegedly refusing assistance from the coast guard.
Rather than take firm measures to cut 0ff illegal migrants entering the European Union to save lives, Brussels’ major initiative in the face of the crisis is to attempt to redistribute migrants throughout the bloc in order to have the burden shared more equally. In order to enforce this edict, the EU has agreed to impose fines of €20,000 for each migrant a country refuses to take in. Countries such as Poland and Hungary have so far said that they will refuse to pay, laying the groundwork for a future showdown over the issue.
The increasing concern over migration among European citizens has coincided, as the leftist New York Times lamented in a recent article, with an “increasing trend of hard-right parties surging in popularity and, in some cases, gaining power by entering governments as junior partners.”
Despite breathless clamouring and fearmongering over the rise of right-wing populist parties across Europe in the pages of legacy newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, the trend only seems to be continuing, with the globalist Dutch government of Mark Rutte falling just last week over the issue of migration, potentially setting the stage for a right-wing populist coalition to take the reigns of power in The Hague in the upcoming elections in November.