The sharp migration crisis that has gripped the European Union for more than a decade has devastated the security of tens of millions of Europeans. The mass inflow of Muslim migrants is eroding the Christian roots of Western civilisation and creating a real threat of hybrid operations conducted against European states. This crisis was triggered by EU-level regulations and asylum policies designed so that Brussels effectively pushed member states out of one of the most crucial areas of national policy: Migration control.
As in many other fields, the goal was centralising power and eroding national sovereignty, carried out in the usual EU style — bypassing governments and stripping them of powers under the pretext of “managing a crisis.” A crisis that Brussels itself created. Instead of becoming another clever instrument for ideological and political centralisation, this artificially induced crisis has turned into a long, drawn-out act of collective suicide for the Old Continent.
The current migration crisis is not merely the result of external pressures or poor decisions. It is closely tied to a political and ideological project in which the Brussels bureaucracy seeks to transform Europe into a post-national space — stripped of Christian foundations, strong identities, and any instinct for self-preservation — while building a political structure without real democratic legitimacy, a form of liberal autocracy on the ruins of sovereign nation-states.
Mass, uncontrolled migration has become the perfect tool for this agenda. First in major metropolitan areas, then in mid-sized cities, and now across entire countries in Western Europe, we see soaring crime, street violence, gang activity, and the breakdown of social cohesion. This is the first and most visible stage of destruction. To understand the deeper causes, we must look at the erosion of Europe’s legal and institutional foundations carried out through the EU asylum system.
In 2013–2014, the EU adopted the package known as Dublin III. In theory, it was meant to improve burden-sharing in granting international protection. In practice, under pressure from NGOs — including those linked to George Soros — the system was made radically more “humanitarian,” replacing rational policy with emotional blackmail. The result was a framework that, already the following year, triggered a new great migration into Europe and, ten years later, brought France, Germany, and Belgium to the brink of social collapse.
Once Dublin III entered into force, Europe witnessed the largest population movements since the end of the Second World War. Generously funded left-liberal NGOs played a key role: Social-media campaigns, legal support for exploiting asylum rules for ordinary immigration, and constant pressure on governments. The system was constructed so that anyone crossing the EU border — legally or illegally — can file an asylum claim, and the state must process it. Even if the claim is obviously unfounded, the procedure must run its course. The migrant gains the right to stay, housing, welfare, and protection from immediate removal. In practice, a single statement is enough to paralyse state authorities.
This is not a bug; it is a feature. EU asylum law is pushed into areas that should clearly belong to national immigration policy. A hyper-liberal, costly standard was imposed on member states at their expense. They have been stripped of sovereignty even in protecting their own borders and determining immigration levels, competences explicitly reserved to them under Article 79 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU. Those that accepted Brussels’ line now face enormous problems with masses of illegal migrants. Those — like Hungary and Poland under national-conservative governments — that resisted and defended their borders are in a far better position. They had to defend themselves not only against a hybrid migrant assault but also a hybrid legal war waged by Brussels.
In 2015, with Angela Merkel’s Herzlich willkommen gesture, the system exploded. Europe began receiving huge numbers of people — mostly men of military age — who had no grounds for asylum but understood perfectly well that EU procedures offered the easiest path to legal residence. Germany opened its borders, and EU institutions tried to spread the consequences of this decision across all member states. In the name of “European solidarity,” they attempted to force countries rejecting open-door policies to accept and relocate migrants. Hungary and Poland refused to participate in this act of collective suicide. This was when the now-standard mechanism became clear: Expanding EU competences and coercing member states through the instrumental use of crises.
In 2021, the regimes of Lukashenko and Putin weaponised migration against Poland, pushing masses of illegal migrants to the Polish border. Months before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they tried to destabilise Poland by sending tens of thousands of illegal migrants mixed with criminals released from Russian prisons. The operation failed: Poland’s conservative government defended the border despite the hysteria of globalist elites, liberal NGOs, celebrities, and opposition politicians attacking soldiers and officers. The operation was supported by a network of NGOs financed, among others, by USAID and the European Commission. They sabotaged the Polish state’s actions, coached migrants on how to break the law, and ran aggressive media campaigns against the Border Guard. It was a classic hybrid attack, proving that migration structures have become a political weapon used by external and internal adversaries alike.
All of this was possible because the EU asylum system is one of the most abuse-prone legal mechanisms in international law. Procedures last for years — enough time for claimants to disappear. Migrants move deeper into Europe, taking advantage of generous welfare; in practice, they settle in Germany, France, and Belgium. Mass population movements conducted in violation or circumvention of the law are a paradise for transnational organised crime, especially human trafficking, including of minors, focused today on organ trafficking and sexual exploitation.
The catastrophic consequences of bad regulations are deepened by liberal court rulings — national and European (the CJEU and the ECtHR) — which systematically block return decisions. The European Court of Human Rights, dominated by left-liberal judges, regularly issues interim measures preventing deportation even in cases of blatant abuse. Judicial activism — the primary tool in the hands of the liberal juristocracy — has further incapacitated European governments and deprived them of the tools needed to protect their citizens from mass migration. A system has emerged in which asylum law has become a shield for economic migrants, criminals, and even individuals linked to terrorist networks, while genuine victims disappear. Many of these victims are Christians facing lethal danger in Islamic countries — something that is of no concern to Brussels or Strasbourg. The woke agenda comes first.
We are witnessing a process in which the European Union — or rather its most powerful state, Germany — uses migration as a tool of political coercion. Germany, unable to cope with the consequences of its own disastrous decisions, is trying to shift the burden onto others. The “Old Union,” which created the system responsible for the current chaos, is now attempting to force its acceptance on states that saw the danger from the beginning, through mechanisms of relocating illegal migrants under the banner of “mandatory solidarity.”
Ten years have made one thing unmistakably clear: Europe needs a deep, radical overhaul of asylum law — a reform that restores national control over borders, enables immediate removal of those who do not meet protection criteria, stops the cycle of abuse, and ends the fiction of procedural cover-ups. Without this, Europe will remain a continent in perpetual crisis, a hostage to its own illusions and ideology — a continent that has lost its survival instinct and can no longer distinguish a genuine refugee fleeing persecution from an economic migrant treating European law as a ticket into a world of unlimited welfare entitlements.
This process of controlled collective suicide can still be reversed — but only through decisive action. The examples are already there: Hungary in 2015, Poland in 2021, and the current reverse-migration policies of Donald Trump. The current left-liberal elites in Brussels and Europe’s capitals have proven — through their immigration policies (just as through their zero-emissions agenda and their woke ideology) — that they not only lack the ability to solve problems effectively, but that they themselves have become the primary obstacle to the development of nations on the Old Continent.
Marcin Romanowski is a Doctor of Law, university lecturer, former Deputy Minister of Justice in the Law and Justice government, currently a Member of the Polish Parliament in exile in Hungary and Director of the Hungarian-Polish Institute of Freedom in Budapest
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