My personal opinion as a non-European who has voted in the UK elections as a Commonwealth citizen: the far-right tends to win broad support in European Parliament elections mostly as a reactionary bulwark against the EU's Open Borders policy (and rightly so). People tend to vote somewhat rationally for national elections.

Honestly, from my perspective, the rise of rampant immigration (and that too contributed by people of my community) is going to damage the entirety of Europe in the long run. Already I've seen firsthand the skewing of the demographic pyramid in the younger generation (0-18 yrs), a lack of worthwhile job prospects for second generation immigrants, and the rising tide of anti-national behaviors from members of migrant communities. As Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed rightly said, the next generation of terrorists will not come from Saudi Arabia or the Middle East, but from Europe. The kind of venom that mosques here in Europe spew is much worse than the extremely highly-monitored mosque sermons in the Middle East, from Egypt to Oman.

From my Muslim perspective, Europe will be a lost cause in a single generation, unless there is a MASSIVE cultural upheaval that stomps and quashes the current migratory trend. Austerity and inequality are just the sparks, but the bigger powder keg is the growing base of increasingly alienated migrants who have to face the austerity and inequality (see Leeds riots very recently). European society was never structured to take in so many incompatible migrants like American society is.

You don’t think indigenous European Muslims are immune to this?

There ought to be a clear distinction between indigenous Muslims who migrated post WW2 all the way to the 80s and 90s, and the recent migration waves which outnumber the former. The former have been able to acclimatize to European culture while still maintaining their roots (not to mention that it was harder to migrate back then - you needed a job already for starters). The latter bring the same tribalistic beliefs of their homelands over here. And trust me, the former DESPISE the latter, and it's an understatement. Not because they want to pull the ladder up after them, but because the latter import the same foul culture that the former wanted to escape from.

As a Muslim, I don't want to see people praying on the roads and streets of Paris. I didn't want to see people chanting "From the river to the sea" for Gazans (who have a very strong reason for being despised by the rest of the Middle East). I don't want to see Muharram processions in Barcelona either.

Fun fact, the Middle East has one of the most relaxed migration policies across the world, yet a lot of European migrants are actually unable to migrate because they are criminals back home (the first condition to obtaining a residence visa is a police clearance).

I meant like Lipka/Crimean Tatars, Bosniaks, Albanians, etc. I get the rest but what’s the problem with Muharram?

Muharram processions are specific to the Shia community. Allowing one and not letting Sunnis or Sufis do some arcane street ritual/procession is recipe for disaster. Best to not allow anything. Let these rituals be relegated to the mosques and Imambaras, not on the streets where they hamper with the daily lives of non-Muslims.

Indigenous Muslims that you had mentioned are my absolute favorite kind of people, that I've eschewed the rest. The rest could actually learn a thing or two from them (but of course they won't).

> The solution should reside in providing better integration and opportunities to migrants, who could very well be part of the solution to Europe's demographic crisis.

The issue is that Europe has already taken in far too many migrants than it can possibly integrate. Right now, taking more migrants isn't a feasible situation if they're impossible to integrate.

The solution to Europe's (or any country's) demographic crisis isn't more migrants. It's making a conducive and affordable environment for families and childbearing. Cheaper healthcare, affordable childcare, cheaper education, etc. and that's just scratching the surface.

> Despite the right's endless whining, immigration has very little real impact on the economy, and crime, overall, has gone down in the last decades.

So is that why Sweden, whose population is 10% non-Swedish now, has had to declare publicly that their crime rates have skyrocketed over the past decade? Why Poland, which took very few migrants pre-Ukraine, has had a very low crime rate? Call me right-wing, but while some of their claims might be horseshit, others are more than obvious truisms.

> The most diverse European cities are also the most productive.

The most diverse cities were already major production centers before migrants entered the picture. For a more accurate reference, compare the levels of non-residential investment into these cities pre and post the migrant crisis.

>In France less than a thousandth of the population could be classified as "immigrants".

France is obviously one of the few countries in Europe that could uniquely integrate its migrant population, but your numbers are wildly inaccurate too. Out of a population of 67 million, 8.7 million were foreign born. Sure foreign born could mean a lot of things, but that still isn't "less than a thousandth" of the population. And a significant number concentrate in the major cities, further ghettoizing them.

I don't believe you can convince your population to raise more children, sure you can make it easier for those that want to, but demographic decline is a worldwide phenomena. It's the endgame of the demographic transition.

What happens in Sweden is mostly due to a resurgence of organized crime. I don't think closing down the country's borders (which, again, isn't feasible by any realistic mean) woulf fix the problem. To find a culprit, you should look at poverty rates which is always much more strongly correlated to crime than ethnicity or whatever else. Here's an article from the Guardian that explores this, for what it's worth: https://theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/30/how-gang-violence-...

When speaking of immigrants I always think of illegal immigrants from Africa, which is what the right talks about anyway. In that regard, I believe my figure of one one thousandth is more accurate.

And how again did organized crime become resurgent in Sweden? Was it not driven by scores of unemployed immigrant youth finding an outlet for their skills, coupled with a relaxed policing culture that was developed in good times?

We're not talking about closing down borders here. We're talking about strongly monitoring the kind of migrants you bring in. The UAE and Singapore are both heavily migrant driven populations, yet don't see this resurgence of crime that we see only in Europe, because they actually preselect their visitors and residents.

As it stands now, it is tougher for me as an affluent non-European to migrate to Sweden, or any other European country (except Switzerland apparently, where I'm at now) for the long term, than it is for me to settle in the UAE or Singapore. It is tougher for my highly skilled friends in tech who want to move to Europe, so they've chosen to move to Singapore instead. On the other hand, both the UAE and Singapore are making it much harder for low-skilled migrants to get in, while they find it much easier to go and settle in Europe. And they are, in hordes.

> And how again did organized crime become resurgent in Sweden? Was it not driven by scores of unemployed immigrant youth finding an outlet for their skills, coupled with a relaxed policing culture that was developed in good times?

In short: no. Read the article whose link I posted above.

> We're not talking about closing down borders here. We're talking about strongly monitoring the kind of migrants you bring in.

And how could we do that ? We can't put policemen along every 4m of the European border. We are already doing random border controls, I don't think we can do much better without bankrupting ourselves.

> The UAE and Singapore are both heavily migrant driven populations, yet don't see this resurgence of crime that we see only in Europe, because they actually preselect their visitors and residents.

I don't think comparing the EU with the UAE makes much sense here. The situations are very different. Also, the UAE depends on massive numbers of foreign low-skilled workers to run the country. There are usually only allowed to stay for the duration of their work, and are hidden away from the rest of the country. There are many reported cases of worker abuse and inhumane working conditions. Overall, I'd wager there to be much more violence in the UAE than in Europe. In any case, you were speaking of values earlier, I don't think Europe has much to learn from the UAE in that department.

As for Singapore, I don't know what to say. It's a city-state, obviously it functions very differently than a continent-sized loose economic union of several country. Not that their ways have nothing of interest to us...

I'll conclude on our exchange, feel free to disagree:

You seem to believe about everyone can get into Europe, which is far from being the case. Famously in France, Macron's government last immigration law was the last one in a series of about a hundred similar ones since WW2.

I am yet to hear of an immigration policy that isn't just "give them less rights, give more money to the police, etc.", which as we have seen is only effective if our goal is to worsen the situation.

The influx of young abled men and women should be a net positive for Europe, and France, where businesses are always complaining of not being able to find enough low-skilled workers. Instead, we are too busy pushing back and making their lives harder to the point of making integration almost impossible and ostracizing them from society, thereby creating the conditions for crime to flourish.

Ah, my mistake. The political commentary and analysis I'd been reading had been saying that, while Macron's party lost seats, his goal may have been to defang the far-right before they got any "real" power in 2027. I guess the commentary was implying that his goal may have been to let the French people see what the far-right would do with their political power, while not risking the presidency.

It sounds a little bit like 4-D chess now that I type it out, I'm not sure I believe it myself.

> It sounds a little bit like 4-D chess now that I type it out, I'm not sure I believe it myself.

The thing is with Macron, he managed to make the journalist class believe he's a genius (he's not dumb, but still miles away from being as brilliant as presented). So whenever he trips on a stone, you get an army of journalist explaining to you how he planned for it all along.