Trump attack on Europe migration 'disaster' masks toughening policies

PARIS (AFP) — For U.S. President Donald Trump, speaking after the release of an American security strategy that warned Europe was on the verge of “civilizational erasure”, the continent’s immigration policy is a “disaster” that will result in many European countries no longer being “viable.”

Speaking in a Politico interview published on Tuesday, Trump said Europe wants to be “politically correct and they don’t want to send them (migrants) back to where they came from,” drawing a contrast with the hardline policy of his administration.

Europe does keep welcoming workers, partly because aging populations and falling birthrates are whittling away at its labor force.

But Trump’s broadside ignores a much more nuanced wider picture, with a tightening crackdown on illegal immigration in Europe leading to a decrease in asylum applications and irregular arrivals.

The European Union’s statistical agency Eurostat counted some 29 million third-country nationals as of Jan. 1, 2024, representing 6.4 percent of the population. In 2021, this figure was 23.8 million.

But countries issued 8% fewer first residence permits last year than in 2023, according to Eurostat, suggesting a slight drop in legal arrivals.

Germany, Spain, France and Italy account for nearly 70% of foreign nationals living in the European Union.

“Part of our economy is based on immigration,” Matthieu Tardis, co-director of the independent research center Synergies Migrations, told AFP, citing France as an example where “the industrial revolution was built on Italian and Polish labor.”

Today, in certain sectors, “foreigners are overrepresented” compared to their proportion of the European population, particularly in health care and construction, he added.

Foreign doctors represent 22% of physicians in Germany, 18% in France, and 41% in the United Kingdom, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Germany sharpens policy

At the end of 2024, Eurostat recorded 1 million asylum-seekers in Europe, down 11% compared to 2023.

During 2024, some 438,000 people were granted refugee status giving them the right to stay.

The number of asylum-seekers has never again reached the level of the 2015 migration crisis, when hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing the war arrived in Europe. At that time, 1.3 million asylum-seekers were recorded.

In terms of irregular immigration, nearly 200,000 arrivals were recorded on European shores in 2024, five times fewer than in 2015, according to the United Nations.

Experts attribute this decrease in part to agreements reached with countries including Turkey, Libya and Tunisia to crack down on boat departures, which have aroused criticism over human rights implications.

In Germany, which hosts the most foreigners in the European Union, conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz has implemented a stricter asylum policy since coming to power in May elections where the far-right Alternative for Germany party achieved its best ever result.

As of the beginning of November, the number of asylum applications in Germany had decreased by more than half compared to 2024.

Italy, Hungary and UK

Italy has already signed a controversial agreement with Albania to outsource the processing of asylum-seekers intercepted at sea. But the measure is currently stalled due to multiple legal challenges in Italian courts.

Since her election in 2022, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, has made combating illegal immigration one of her priorities.

At the same time, the Italian government has increased the number of work visas issued (450,000 between 2023 and 2025, compared to 75,700 in 2022) in order to address labour shortages as the population ages and birth rates decline.

This pattern has been repeated in Hungary under nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, where only 29 asylum-seekers — excluding those from Ukraine — were registered in 2024.

But the number of foreigners residing in the country has increased over the past 10 years, through his “guest” worker policy, rising from nearly 146,000 to over 255,000 expected by 2025.

Outside the European Union, in the United Kingdom, net immigration plummeted by nearly 69% year-on-year, the Office for National Statistics reported at the end of November.

This data confirms a downward trend since the peak reached in 2023, largely due to the policies of the previous Conservative government, although there has been no let up in irregular Channel crossings.

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By ESTELLE EMONET and TIPHAINE LE LIBOUX with AFP’s European bureaus, Agence France-Presse